Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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much disgrace /With four or five most vile and ragged foils, /
Right ill-dispos'd in brawl ridiculous,/The name of Agincourf, yet no one has taken this as evidence that the ensuing
battle was played for laughs, although I suppose that too is
coming.
A more serious objection, I believe, is that Antonio's part
is a very special one because it includes the female disguise,
which is of course the point of the joke. If Marston had
wished to focus attention on the discrepancy in age (rather
than sex) between the actors and their roles, which is the
basis of Mr. Foakes's interpretation (where the boys are
'consciously ranting in oversize parts', 'mimicking rather
than simply representing men', 'aping adults self-consciously',
'strutting like adult actors' in 'burlesques of adult styles',
etc.1), we would surely expect him to suggest this, as he so
easily could, through some of the actors who were to play
undisguised adult males. But there are no such suggestions
in the entire Induction. Moreover, the Prologue and the
Epilogue to Antonio and Mellida and the Prologue to
Antonio's Revenge, all of which contain the conventional
admission of 'imperfections' and plea for indulgence, never
relate this to the youth of the actors (which is not even
hinted at), let alone to any intention to exploit their youth.
So I would have to say of the two Antonio plays, as I said
of The New Inn, that in the extra-dramatic components
where the author is able, more or less directly, to speak for
himself, he gives no indication of the purpose which the
parody-seekers attribute to him.
The only other evidence Professor Foakes supplies from
Antonio and Mellida is the episode at the end of Act I where
Antonio is placed in an embarrassing position because of his
disguise as an Amazon. Again I would agree that this is
meant to be humorous, and again I fail to see how it supports his case. Indeed here I cannot even see why the
humour depends on, or points to, the actor's age, since the
ladies who treat him as a woman are themselves also played
by boys, as are the men who earlier left the stage. This kind
of comic situation resulting from a transvestite role was not
uncommon in the drama of the period, nor was it limited to
the children's companies or even to a child actor, nor did it
imply a parodic treatmentcompare, for instance, Viola's
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ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
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ESSAYS IN OUTIfflSM
RICHARD LEVIN
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