Bonvile and Annabel; aka The Age of Reason Comes Early
As I mentioned last time, sometimes the characters behave better (i.e., more rationally or with more psychological realisism) than you might expect, which continues here.
For instance, Bonvile’s behavior is, at least from a certain perspective, quite rational. In a culture that highly prized friendship, he lives up to those ideals, and he rationalizes his behavior. He says:
I still prefer my friend before my pleasure,
Which is not lost forever, but adjourned
For more mature employment. (1.2.158-60)
Speaking of mature, you have to be a really good friend to give up your wedding night, even if it was more common in the early modern period not to consummate the wedding on the first night of the wedding celebrations. (I can’t find a citation for this practice right now, but I swear I remember reading it at some point, and it coincides with what is often said in early modern works about postponing consummation, as in The Maid’s Tragedy.)
And Annabel, despite being given a fantastic excuse to leap to conclusions, behaves as though she had some reason to trust the man she has just married. (I know my students would like that part; they get easily fed up with Shakespearean characters who fly off the handle at the least hint of improper behavior without so much as communicating with their loved ones.) She reassures her father:
… I have questioned with my meditations,
And they have rendered well and comfortably
To the worst fear I found. Suppose this day
He had long since appointed to his foe
To meet, and fetch a reputation from him
–Which is the dearest jewel unto man.
Say he do fight, I know his goodness such
That all those powers that love it are his guard,
And ill cannot betide him. (2.4.65-73)
Even if this seems a little more “stand by your man” than “stop him from engaging in dangerous behavior because it’s fundamentally selfish,” and thus maybe a bit more mid-twentieth century than twenty-first century, it focuses on the rational more than the emotional. She does not respond purely with instinct or emotion but says that she has questioned with [her] meditations and compared them to her worst-case scenario.
(Worst-case scenario fans, note that her worst-case scenario is pretty much on the money.)
I’m not really going to defend the end of her speech as being brilliantly rational, but it at least gets chalked up on the side of her not assuming the worst.
Furthermore, when Lessingham insults Annabel to her father, her father assumes she’s innocent rather than guilty, but he also asks for evidence and then refutes it. (Leonato in Much Ado could take notes.)
However, if all of the characters were consistently rational, we’d be a little short on conflict. As a result, this play may be open to the imputation that some of the characters are inconsistent – but in what early modern play is that not true?
My favorite plot twist is still ahead.
Also, there will be a highwayman and a sea battle. What could be better than that?
Bonus quote (from Woodroff, Annabel’s father, urging people to be merry at the wedding festivities when the celebrating has died down because of Bonvile’s disappearance):
Fie, gentlemen, within
The music plays unto the silent walls,
And no man there to grace it. When I was young,
At such a meeting I have so bestirred me,
Till I have made the pale green-sickness girls
Blush like the ruby, and drop pearls apace
Down from their ivory foreheads; in those days
I have cut capers thus high. (1.1. 125-32)
On the one hand, when you come right down to it, it’s a description of sweat.
On the other hand, the high rhetoric here contrasts so beautifully with the content that it ultimately renders it humorous — and yet it still feels genuine and moves me.
[…] a final bit of conflict in Act 5, which I alluded to before here, where Lessingham attempts to convince Annabel’s father that there’s something unsavory […]