Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Otway's The Souldiers Fortune (1681) and theatre/sex/body work -…
Otway's
The Souldiers Fortune
(1681) and theatre/sex/body work
What can we read for to historicize performance events? What does this teach us about sexual cultures and history of sexuality?
moralist panics (hi, Jeremy Collier):
A Short View of the Immorality
: plays
should
be good and morally instructive--instead, plays are vehicles for corruption; it's also a problem with glorifying immoral content (debauchery); the fears of respectablility of this lewd work; it's gone too far!
the paratextual packaging is about fantasy bleeding into the real world (from fiction into life); also dangerous that the poets pick WOMEN to do this (big crisis)
The Souldiers Fortune
by Otway; 1681
How does the first act set up economic precarity and the money economy? What connections does Otway make between money, sex, and pleasure?
1.1 pg 4-5: the idea of being a blight on parishes; joking about regulating the economy of maidenhood. It's an axiety that unemployed soldiers are going to wreck (sexually) London; Otway exposes the "viurtue" as a money market.
it's all body work/sex work: "Do rail, Courtine, do it, and it may be employment" joke is rail is both complain and also rail rail. Does this demonize sex work?
sucking on gold on stage (2) Money as the ultimate representation of commodity. lieratlize consumer goods:
The Plot of Souldier's Fortune: Beaugaurd and Courtine, in economic precarity after their troop has been disbanded, are in London seeking sex and financial security. Fourbin informs them of Sir Jolly Jumble, a "pimp" who can set them up with mistresses and coin. He has begun a strategy for Beaugard and Lady Dunce
Lady Dunce is married to an older, fat, and disabled man, Davy Dunce. Beaugard and her were in love before Beaugaurd's military service. SHe fakes being repulsed by Beaugard in order to get Davy Dunce to deliver letters and rings to B.
to get Lady D and B together, the plan is to fake Beaugard's death so after paying for murder in the bar, Davy would look suspicious. They do so, and Davy thinks he sees ghosts and demons while D & B hook up (and Jumble watches).
They move the "corpse" next door and continue to party. Davy calls the cops, and he is either forced to admit B and D are lovers (and be publicly embarrassed as a cuckold) or admit plotting to kill a man. He chooses the cuckold.
there's happy endings for guys! NSA continued relationship with a rich lady, and a marriage that secures 200 pounds for a marriage?!
this is built between men; it's also built through visual pleasure/pleasure in looking
Courtine is in love with Sylvia, Jumble's adopted daughter. She claims to hate him.
Sylvia hangs Courtine's body out a balcony and ties him up after he's blacked out. She admits they're in love. They marry by the end.
this Restoration convoluted sex plot is a precursor to Some Like It Hot? This play is also A LOT--it's staging a lot of taboos and being open IN A SOCIAL SETTING; There's something here about community/communal pleasures? Also, if their anxiety is being cuckolded, and it's by extension a fear of masculinity, then
Essay 2 prompt: digging up history stuffs
what kind of primary sources from the archives can we find to help us in our HistSex research?
moralist/anti-theatricality tracts; tracts/theses on the badness of the stage or the use of the stage (Collier); Collier teaches us about how writers and even the general public would
interact
with plays--
broadsides and pahmplets (Hic Mulier, Haec Vir)
17th and 18th century print collections:
https://findit.library.yale.edu/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&utf8=%E2%9C%93&f%5Bdigital_collection_sim%5D%5B%5D=Lewis+Walpole+Library&search_field=all_fields&q=anthony+leigh
poems/satires (Samuel Butler's waaay too personal attacks on actors' sex life and health); shows us the larger network of sexual discourses around actors' bodies; you see the actors in their roles; this is the birth of celebrity
actors writing back (Apology for the Life of COlley Cibber)