The Duchess of Malfi - John Webster
Hadn't read any plays from this period before (apart from the obligatory Shakespearean stuff). Really dark and visceral - felt almost gothic. Sex, murder, incest, revenge, lycanthropy and more murder. Unff, as they say.
I'll have to check that out. Right now I'm on a Shakespeare binge, making my way through all of his works, but I've made a slight detour into John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1630ish). It's pretty wild stuff, also featuring murder, sex and incest. Something must have been going around in the water at the time, lol.Originally Posted by squirreltual
Yeah, I think it's one of Kafka's more boring books. It's like a one-joke song that just never goes anywhere beyond the initial conceit. It's about isolation and alienation (of artists? of depressives? or diasporic communities? of modern man? something like that) like a lot of his works, but it doesn't have the pervasive and sometimes funny bizarreness that fills his other books. Amerika was his most memorable for me. It's about a young man who is banished by his family to America for sexual indiscretion.
"How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
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