"Do you know the one about the Jewish guy and the Muslim Turk? They gang up on this Christian friar and strangle him. Then they take him into the street and prop him up on a staff, as if he were alive and begging. Along comes another friar, who doesn't like the first friar, so he grabs the staff and beats the life out of him, unaware that he's already dead."
"And here's the joke: they used to be kings! And they're lucky, because there's another king, a British one, who has to stand in filthy water for ten days, with the sound of a drum to stop him from sleeping. You know, like at Abu Ghraib. At last, he lies down on a feather bed, which sounds nice, except a table is laid on top of him and men stomp on it. Then he gets raped with a red-hot poker."
"What sort of sickos, you might ask, would watch this stuff for fun? Answer: Londoners in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. All the scenes above come from plays by Christopher Marlowe-respectively, "The Jew of Malta," first performed in 1592, "Tamburlaine, Part 2" (1587), and "Edward II" (1592). Going to the theatre in that period was hardly an entertainment for the fainthearted, and calamity was not confined to the stage."
Christopher Marlowe's plays stage graphic violence, sexual cruelty, and darkly comic inversions of power that shock modern sensibilities. Scenes include murder, torture, public humiliation, and racial or religious caricature, as in The Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine, Part 2, and Edward II. London audiences in the 1580s–1590s attended and sometimes celebrated such brutal spectacles. Theatrical venues were disease-prone and intermittently closed to prevent plague, and performances mixed sensational content with rough staging conditions. The plays combine grotesque physicality, political humiliation, and transgressive humor reflecting popular appetite for extreme spectacle.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]