Games and Gaming in Early Modern Drama by Caroline Baird

Author:Caroline Baird
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030508579
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

In this grotesque parody of betrothal handfasting, the hand represents agency, as before, but the image of Susan dismembering herself and sending her motionless hands to Acton, illustrates her powerlessness, or, as Rowe says of Lavinia’s stumps in Titus Andronicus , ‘the powerful ability of someone else’s hand’.113 Susan intends to safeguard her honour by taking her own life. Charles understands what she is, and is not, prepared to do, and the dangerous game he plays. He is the last to talk of ‘hazard’: ‘Her honour she will hazard, though not lose’ (14.89).

The honour game has been made explicit: to the amazed knight, Susan has referred to herself ‘As forfeit to your hand’ (14.116). A forfeit is an article ‘which a player gives up by way of penalty for some mistake’.114 Like Frankford, Charles has played ‘at forsat’, following rules, however stringent (and, for Susan, dire). Acton has acknowledged the gage of honour in the verb he uses: ‘Since you have not spared/To engage your reputation to the world’ (14.135–36, my italics).115 With Susan accepted as a ‘gift/In satisfaction of all former wrongs’, (14.141–42), but as his wife. His words: ‘This jewel I will wear here in my heart’ (14.143), mirror Frankford’s plangent question to Anne: ‘Did I not […]/Wear thee here in my heart?’ (13.114–15). As A.W. Ward noted, there has been a ‘victory of loftier over lower motives’, with Acton collecting the most honour cards.116

The deathbed scene completes the game conceit with notable hand and heart imagery. As Moisan says, it ‘antiphonally reprises the opening moments of the play’.117 Frankford has wrestled with his rules, or the contradictions of duly disciplining his wife, and his Christian duty to exercise compassion. As Laura Bromley says: ‘Both plots test a man’s honour, his loyalty to an explicit code of behaviour’.118 Word has reached him of Anne’s desire to see him before she dies. She asks if he will ‘take a spotted strumpet by the hand’ (17.78) and, with arresting imagery, too weak to kneel, but as if she throws her last Heart card onto the table she begs his forgiveness: ‘on my heart’s knees/My prostrate soul lies thrown down at your feet’ (17.90–1). Frankford declares her ‘honest in heart’ (17.120), and they are remarried moments before she dies. His utterance, ‘O she’s dead,/And a cold grave must be our nuptial bed’, recalls the proleptic danse macabre and winding sheet, alluded to at their first wedding.

In the aftermath of being caught Anne was still gaming and prepared to ‘hazard’ her soul. She has atoned and no longer playing a secret hand of cards she has yielded her spirit unto her Saviour’s hands. She addresses her soul: ‘Pardoned on earth, soul, thou in heaven art free’ (17.121). Adams has remarked that domestic tragedy was ‘the dramatic equivalent of the homiletic tract and the broadside ballad’, and we can see some truth in his remark if we consider the final words of ‘Shaking of the Sheets’:119Be ready therefore, watch and pray,

That when my Minstrel pipe doth play,

You may to Heaven dance the way.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.