The Insatiable Foil

So while I wait for Thomas Middleton I keep reading his contemporaries.  I don't know why, because they continue to make me feel dreary.  Webster whirls he audience on a trip to chaos and perdition.  And my latest reading was a strange mix of comedy and tragedy, and both styles leaving me drained once again.  I think I'm satiated right now, but tonight during the long hours of the silent morning I might just pick up Webster again and delve right into The Duchess of Malfi.  I will attempt restraint.

So I just finished The Insatiate Countess by William Barksted and Lewis Machin.  Collaborations were common in renaissance drama.  Even Shakespeare collaborated with others as well, though those people are not given much credit!  I have trouble calling this a play.  It is more like two shorter plays with the same theme of adultery and lust combined, kind of similar to Grindhouse.  The tragic short play is an absurd story about a countess whose love is flighty and shifts from one paramour to another.  Even on her wedding night her love drifted to another man and they ran off together.  She keeps doing this and eventually her name is slandered so she uses her sexuality to dupe a man into killing the slanderer.  Her sexuality is so powerful that it is likened to sorcery, and her victims are excused of their crimes (murder) because they were put under a sexual spell.

The other half of the play was comedy about two rivals in business who try and cuckold the other on the same night.  It is just as absurd a story and the other half of the play.  The loyal wives realize what their husbands are up to and trick the men into thinking they are cheating.  Of course  the portrayal of women are less that flattering in this play. --or plays?  So these two wives talk about sex the whole time and crack jokes on how their husbands were so much better when they thought they were with another man's wife.  Some of it was quite funny.

Most of the play was lewd talk about sex and about having sex.  It was borderline pornographic, which makes me wonder how this was received at the time.  I don't think I am being prudish in making this observation.  All said, I found the mix of the two plays uncomfortable.  The characters from one half did not interact with the other half.  The only structural connection was that the Duke of the city they both took place in was the judge of both sides.  He was kind of the Deus ex Machina at the end that united the two halves in judgement.

One could also judge the play as an extreme example of a playwright going way out of his way to create a moral foil.  In this case the foil of the tragic half is the comic half.  Half of the total play was used to create foils!