Tuesday, October 30, 2007

"I'll take the Irish"

If the "green world" of Hyde Park's pastoral interior is representative of an enclosed, quintessentially "English" (and artistocratic) space that is at once both interior and exterior (like the double nature of the stage of the playhouse), what does it say for the effectiveness of the supposed boundaries drawn around the Park that so many transnational references pervade the play? From the victorious Irish racer (though Shirley himself had been in Dublin in the early 1630s when the London playhouses were closed due to plague) to the constant discussion of language and the danger of "mistranslation" (that is, the failure of language -- plain English -- to communicate meaning), the idea of Englishness as something fixed, defensible, and final seems challenged by the play. Of particular interest in this context is Mistress Carol's fantastic speech in III.ii in which she dissects the anatomy of Fairfield's face in explicitly transnational terms, her light mockery haunted by a distinct racial anxiety:

"Would I had art enough to draw your picture,
It would show rarely at the Exchange; you have
A medley in your face of many nations:
Your nose is Roman, which your next debauchment
At tavern, with the help of pot or candlestick,
May turn to Indian, flat; your lip is Austrian,
And you do well to bite it; for your chin,
It does incline to the Bavarian poke,
But seven years may disguise it with a beard,
And make it more ill favored; you have eyes,
Especially when you goggle thus, not much
Unlike a Jew's, and yet some men might take 'em
For Turk's by the two half moon that rise about 'em. --
[Aside] I am an infidel to use him thus."

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