’Adsheartlikins!
“Marriage is as certain a bane to love,” Willmore remarks in 5.1, “as lending money is to friendship” (p. 243). Can we read the economic ties between the banished cavaliers, and their suggestions about how their finances do and do not work, against their attitudes toward sex, camaraderie, and honor? At first they express concern about a prostitute duping Blunt because he holds “our whole estate at present” (2.1, p. 185). Admitting he doesn’t have the thousand pounds to purchase Angellica, Willmore considers going in on a joint venture with friends and merchants (2.2, p. 193). Belvile vows he will not lend Blunt any money to help the Essex country boy regain his standing (4.3, p. 227). What kinds of resources and resourcefulness win out in the play, and which are punished?
How is meaning, especially a sense of essence, communicated in The Rover? How can any sign or event be read as verifiably true? Blunt vows against Florinda in 4.5, “I will…then hang thee out at my window by the heels, with a paper of scurvy verses fastened to thy breast in praise of damnable women” (p. 229). Throughout the play, we observe characters going through the process of reading other characters (such as the masqueraders in 1.2) or expounding upon other signifiers, both linguistic (so many vows!) and material (the portrait of Angellica). Perhaps the most crucial interpretive moment, for the sake of the plot, is the reading Florinda in 4.5 to determine whether she is maid or harlot. She produces a valuable ring, which buys her enough time to save her virginity. Characters express much anxiety about what can be truly expressed or faithfully believed. Angellica, for one, simply gives up. What can be properly understood and verified in the kinds of relationships expressed in the play? Are inconstancy and indeterminacy the only values?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment