• Two Lamentable Tragedies and True Crime Publics in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy
• Sheila Coursey (bio)

Reading the early critical history of Two Lamentable Tragedies (c.1601) is a fairly entertaining journey of creative editorial insults. R.A. Law labeled the play as "gruesome and crude beyond redemption," while W. W. Greg condemned it as an "extraordinary wooden bombast of grotesque commonplace."¹ Perhaps because of this early disparagement, Two Lamentable Tragedies remains one of the least-read early modern domestic tragedies, or plays that dramatize popular contemporary events within a bourgeois household.² Two Lamentable Tragedies resembles many early modern domestic tragedies like Arden of Faversham (c. 1592), A Warning for Fair Women (1599), or A Yorkshire Tragedy (c. 1608) in that it stages a dramatic adaptation of a true-crime narrative, a domestic news story already circulating within the public sphere.³ The play depicts the 1594 murder of chandler Robert Beech by his neighbor Thomas Merry. After killing Beech in his own home, Thomas is driven by paranoia into further acts of onstage violence; he kills Beech's apprentice Winchester to silence him and then dismembers Beech's corpse, scattering the parts around London. Thomas's sister Rachel struggles with her role as an unwilling accomplice, and Thomas's servant Harry Williams ultimately rebels against his master, confessing to the authorities and condemning Thomas and Rachel to a final onstage execution. While these events are narrated by the allegorical figures of Truth, Avarice, and Homicide, the play also contains a near-Dickensian cast of peripheral Londoners who [End Page 263] investigate Beech's disappearance: Beech's near-deaf landlord Loney, a pair of wisecracking watermen, three neighbors who take on the part of amateur detectives, a gentleman, and a particularly intelligent spaniel.⁴

Greg and Law's denunciation of both the content and form of Two Lamentable Tragedies partially echoes many of the denunciations and negotiations featured in early modern crime writing and theatre, often mixing the lure of the "grotesque commonplace" with preemptive defenses against possible accusations that their works were both morally and aesthetically distasteful. Holinshed, when adding the story of Alice Arden's murder of her husband to his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587) notes that the "horribleness" of Arden's murder overrides the impulse that "otherwise may seem to be but a private matter, and therefore, as it were, impertinent to this history."⁵ Lena Cowen Orlin has framed Holinshed's gestures as an attempt to maintain "the traditional hierarchical distinction between the public and domestic sphere," a distinction that domestic tragedy 'impertinently' transgressed in the late sixteenth century.⁶

In performance, domestic tragedies often acknowledged this "impertinence" in the prologue or induction by drawing attention to the truth of their narrative while simultaneously framing this 'truth' as a kind of collective mourning rather than a public dissection. For example, A Warning for Fair Women opens with the allegorical narrator Tragedy noting to the audience that:

My Scene is London, native and your own,I sigh to think my subject too well known,I am not feigned: many now in this round,Once to behold me in sad teares were drowned

(95–98).⁷

This rhetoric of overwhelming tears and lamentation is echoed in The Yorkshire Tragedy, which advertises itself on its title page as "not so New as Lamentable and true," and most rigorously in Two Lamentable Tragedies, where Truth, Homicide and Avarice struggle for control over the stage. Truth banishes Homicide and Avarice as "sad, greedie, gaping, hungrie Canibals,/ That joy to practice other's miseries," turning to solicit the audience to "prepare your teare bedecked eyes . . . Truth rues to tell the truth of these laments" (A3^r).⁸ The hyperbolic lament [End Page 264] of Truth presents tears as the counterbalance to the uncomfortable possibility that the audience, too, are the "sad, greedie, gaping, hungrie Canibals" that flock to the theatre to see the miseries of others.

This essay argues that despite its formal shortcomings, or perhaps because of them, Two Lamentable Tragedies offers a new mode of framing the relationship between domestic tragedies and their audiences. Over the course of the play, Beech's murder is solved, and...

• 现代早期家庭悲剧中的两个悲惨悲剧和真正的犯罪公众。
• Sheila Coursey（生物）

阅读《两个可悲的悲剧》（c.1601）的早期批判历史是创造性的社论侮辱的相当有趣的旅程。劳·劳（RA Law）将这出戏标为“可怕而又不可救赎的粗野”，而WW·格雷格（WW Greg）则将其戏称为“怪诞的普通木制轰炸机”。¹也许是由于这种早期的悲剧，《两个可悲的悲剧》仍然是鲜为人知的近代现代家庭悲剧之一，或戏剧化了资产阶级家庭中当代流行事件的戏剧。² 两个可悲的悲剧类似于许多早期的现代国内悲剧，例如Faversham的Arden（c。1592），Fair女士的警告（1599）或约克郡悲剧（约1608年）的故事形式是对真实犯罪故事的戏剧化改编，这是一部已​​经在公共领域流传的国内新闻报道。³该剧描绘了1594年钱德勒·罗伯·比奇（Robert Beech）被邻居托马斯·梅利（Thomas Merry）谋杀的故事。托马斯在自己的家中杀死比奇后，被偏执狂带入了舞台上的进一步暴力行动。他杀死了比奇的学徒温彻斯特（Winchester）使他沉默，然后将比奇的尸体肢解了，将零件散布在伦敦各地。托马斯的姐姐雷切尔（Rachel）扮演一个不甘心的帮凶而挣扎，托马斯的仆人哈里·威廉姆斯（Harry Williams）最终叛逆了他的主人，向当局承认，并谴责托马斯和雷切尔在舞台上被处决。这些事件由真相，阿瓦里斯和凶杀的寓言人物叙述，但该剧还包含近狄更斯时代的外围伦敦人演员，这些人的结尾[263页]调查比奇的失踪情况：比奇的近聋房东洛尼（Loney），一对狡猾的水手，三个邻居组成的业余侦探，一个绅士和一个特别聪明的西班牙猎狗。⁴

格雷格和劳对两种可悲悲剧的内容和形式的谴责，在某种程度上呼应了早期现代犯罪写作和戏剧中的许多谴责和谈判，常常将“怪诞的平民”的诱惑与先发制人的辩护结合起来，以防他们的作品受到指责在道德和美学上都令人反感。霍林谢德（Holinshed）在将爱丽丝·雅顿（Alice Arden）谋杀丈夫的故事添加到他的英格兰，苏格兰和爱尔兰编年史（1587）中时，指出雅顿被谋杀的“可怕性”超越了“否则似乎只是私人问题”的冲动。因此，这与这段历史无关。” ⁵莉娜·科文·奥林（Lena Cowen Orlin）将霍林谢德的举动归结为一种尝试，以维持“公共领域与家庭领域之间的传统等级划分”，这一区分是家庭悲剧在十六世纪末“无意间”超越了。⁶

在表演中，家庭悲剧常常在序言或归纳中承认这种“无礼”，即引起人们对叙事真实性的关注，同时将这种“真相”视为一种集体哀悼而不是公开的解剖。例如，以警告女性为开场白的寓言叙事悲剧向观众指出：

我的场景是伦敦，土生土长，属于您自己，我叹为观止，以为我的主题太出名了，我没有装腔作势：现在这一轮有很多人，曾经以悲伤的眼泪注视着我而淹死了

（95-98）。⁷

压倒性的眼泪和哀叹的言辞在《约克郡悲剧》中得到了回应，在其标题页上宣传自己“不像可悲而真实的新事物”，而在《两个可悲的悲剧》中则最为严格，在那儿真相，杀人罪和贪婪为争取控制权而斗争。舞台。真相撵杀人和贪婪的“伤心，greedie，目瞪口呆，hungrie Canibals，/那快乐练习其他的苦难，”转向征求观众“准备特亚律珠光宝气的眼睛。真相rues告诉这些感叹的真相” （A3 ^r）。⁸双曲线的哀叹[End Page 264] 真相》（The Truth）引起了眼泪，以抵消观众也难免出现的“悲伤，贪婪，张狂，饥饿的Canibals”的势头，这些观众涌向剧院观看其他人的痛苦。

本文认为，尽管有正式的缺陷，或者也许是由于它们的缺陷，《两个可悲的悲剧》还是提供了一种新的模式来构建家庭悲剧与听众之间的关系。在整个演出过程中，比奇的谋杀案得以解决，并且...