Wednesday 30 May 2012

#58 A Bloody Banquet

The play A Bloody Banquet was written mostly by Middleton and also be Thomas Dekker.  The title of the play suggests exactly what happens at the end.  It foreshadows a very memorable and grotesque scene, of which is the only part of the play that was memorable for me.  This was a play with some structural problems and some important stuff left unsaid.

The the ending involved the adulteress Queen being force fed her lover Tymethes.   She has to drink blood from his skull, and eat his flesh while her husband looks on.  Not only that, but he invited pilgrims into the court to also see this spectacle.  And it turns out that one of the pilgrim's was Tymethe's father, though he didn't know until someone mentioned the name of the corpse.  I can only imagine the stillness and uncomfortable feelings of the characters in the play.  Watching cannibalism and the husband proud of his punishment on his wife.  Well of course the father of Tymethes isn't going to just sit around and do nothing, he makes himself known as well as his associates.  The husband knowing he is beat first kills his wife the Queen and then is stabbed to death numerously.  And that is a bloody banquet.  I did like the play though, despite some missing passages and that I felt it could have been longer at parts.

When Middleton does tragedy, in some respects he is superior to Shakespeare, and by superior I mean the carnage and grotesqueness.  But also some of his characters seem more developed.  I have to say seemed because I haven't really done a serious study of this.

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