The London Courant and Westminster Chronicle (February 26, 1781): 3

THEATRICAL INTELLIGENCE.

COVENT-GARDEN.

Saturday evening a new comedy, called The World as it Goes, or A Party at Montpelier, was performed for the first time at this theatre.

Mrs. Cowley, for some reasons peculiar to herself, takes care to ascertain her right to her productions, by avowing them, in all advertisements, previous and even subsequent to their exhibition. It was owing to this peculiarity, that the author of this article had the information that Mrs. Cowley is the author of The World as it Goes.

The events of the comedy are supposed to have happened at Montpelier, but evidently by a person who was never at the place, and who has moved in a sphere very different from that which she attempts to describe.

The principal characters are Sir John1 [sic] and Lady Danvers, an unhappy couple, for a reason which seems too improbable even for the stage; for Sir John, even while his affection is unabated, affects the most determined and cruel indifference to her; drives her into a convent, where an indecent attempt on her virtue by a Friar [sic], is interrupted by Sir John, who had been driven by love to force her away. The author's attempt to give effect to their meeting, rendered it ridiculous; for Sir John drew his sword and run [sic] it into the Friar's thigh; a circumstance sufficient to denominate the piece a tragedy, according to modern apprehensions. The other persons are Mr. Grub, a city broker, and his two daughters; one too vulgar for a camp-follower, and the other an accomplished fine lady. A Mr. Fairfax, in love with the accomplished Miss Grub, but out of favour in the family, for having affronted Miss Molly, the father's favourite, follows the family to Montpelier, which he finds full of impostors, whose business it is to impose on Englishmen.

As Miss Molly is inexorable on the subject of her sister's marriage, but very intent on her own, and likely to be the dupe of some of those pretended Barons and Marquises to be found at such places, he determines to enlist himself among Miss Molly's lovers, in order to obtain her consent to her sister's marriage, on the day appointed for her own. This is but an indifferent contrivance, and the incidents arising from it were not relished.

Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) grew up in the small town of Tiverton, Devon, the daughter of Hannah (nee Richards) and Philip Parkhouse (ca. 1712–1790). An excellent scholar, her father had been “educated for Holy Orders,” but with scant prospect of securing a church living, he “became a Bookseller, as the nearest approach he could then prudently make to a life of some degree of literary enjoyment” and a member of Tiverton's corporation. As Angela Escott points out,

Philip Parkhouse befriended Lord Harrowby, a Member of Parliament, who provided Cowley with contacts in London during the early stages of her career and subsequently helped her husband, Thomas Cowley, obtain a position with the East India Company.

The anonymous author of the preface to The Works of Mrs. Cowley (1813) describes the genesis of Cowley's first play:

Cowley sent her comedy to the renowned actor David Garrick, the manager of Drury Lane Theatre, who generously “tightened the text without damaging the charm and ingenuousness of the characters and situations, and helped her structure into the text moments that are clearly performable.” The Runaway premiered on February 15, 1776, and was an instant success, playing for seventeen nights. Unfortunately for Cowley, Garrick retired from the stage on June 10, 1776, and his successor as manager of Drury Lane, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, treated Cowley more like a theatrical rival than a protégée.

Another Country

Drama is another country. And tragedy is a precinct all its own. It is true that dramas can be read, and some dramas have been written to be read. It is true too that if tragedy is its own precinct, it has many wards, and each ward can have its own traditions, values and assumptions. Still, on the subject of depicting violence, tragedy, for all its varieties, would seem to be uniquely charged and equipped to come to terms with it, for the common theme of tragedy in every ward is unnatural suffering, pain and grief, primarily at the hands of violent men and women and pitiless gods, and its common attitude is seriousness, what Aristotle called spoudaios. It has little use for the “moral economy” of violence, as in the novella, which caused the novella to arrive at a preliminary and often facetious balance sheet of good and evil, even in the face of outrageous injustice; nor is it disposed, in its main action, toward the heroic labors of violence as in epic and romance. Instead it aims toward provoking a specific effect, Aristotle's “pity and fear” and “catharsis.” In fact, there was a great deal of debate in the Renaissance, especially in Italy, about what “catharsis” and “pity and fear” referred to, and about how important they were in relation to other fundamental qualities of tragedy, like spoudaios, magnitude, catastrophe and recognition. But few if any disagreed that tragedy had a specific effect, which involved emotional and moral provocation. Neither the novella nor the romance was designed to elicit that effect, even in the case of tragic tales in novelle and tragic episodes in epic and romance.

Talking about the “effects” of tragedy may seem overly utilitarian; but the subject was a major part of discussions of tragedy among critics and theorists, as well as among anti-theatrical polemicists, and it is not a utilitarian effect that I will be discussing here, but rather an immediate response by spectators to the experience of drama.

This book addresses the representation of violence in Renaissance literature. It tries to account for the impulse to put violence into words or, in the case of drama, to put violence into words spoken on stage, coupled with gesture, movement and spectacle. And it tries to measure that impulse against the actual conditions of violence in the period. There were many sides to this impulse. Violence was often represented in literature as an expression of rage or desperation, but it was also frequently represented as the means toward a reasonably desired end, or an end that could be rationalized before or after the fact, however brutal or cruel. Violence could be undertaken by noblemen or commoners, by magistrates and thieves, by legitimate agents of the state or by rebels against the state. It could be individual or collective. It could be defensive or offensive. It could follow established codes of conduct (as in a duel) or provocatively defy all rules (as in an insurrection or a massacre of civilians). It could be tidy or horrendous. But it was always—or at least so this study will conceptualize the phenomenon—an action that was performed. Representations of violence in the Renaissance were in effect performances of performances or, in other words, re-presentations of presentations.

Exploring these performances of performances, this study focuses on four genres or modes of writing—the novella, the Menippean prose satire, the epic romance and tragic drama—and it emphasizes how these writings both contextualize the performance of violence and undergo contextualization by the pressure of events beyond their control. Along the way the study examines how storytelling (about violence and other matters) emerges from oral tradition to become a self-consciously literary pursuit, as well as how it discovers the historical dimensions of everyday life, treating such topics as vengeance, war and sexual assault as encounters not only between rivals or enemies but also between the individual and society, or between private aspirations and public actualities. When discussing satirical prose this study examines just war theory and pacifism, referring their progress, on the one hand, to ancient theoretical and ecclesiastical traditions and, on the other, to new developments in the technology, the ideology and the undertaking of war. What does it mean to go to war? these writings ask disapprovingly.

Silva and Vargas Valdés's Gothic flourished as a curiosity rather than as a constant in the Colombian literature of the late nineteenth century. At this time, what writers were more interested in producing and what was being read the most were different forms of poetry (mainly romantic and symbolist) and costumbristas narratives, most of them created in Bogotá, the so-called illustrated center of the nation. Writers such as José Eugenio Díaz Castro (1803–1865), María Josefa Acevedo de Gómez (1803–1861), Luis Segundo de Silvestre (1838–1887), Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833–1913), and Rafael Pombo (1833–1912) were originally from Bogotá and were enthroned as canonical national writers. This literary centralization was part of the construction of the imagined community of Colombia from Bogotá (which politically occurred in 1886, after the triumph of the centralist political party), a city that was bizarrely envisioned by lettered Colombians and a handful of other Latin American elites as a “South American Athens.” As Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez asserts, it is in the nineteenth century that a symbolic framework of Colombia was established as follows:

All these elements were cultivated in the small, cold Bogotá, which since then began to direct the destiny of the country through public policies, but also through the creation of cultural frames of reference, asserting Bogotá and its cultural productions as the benchmark for the rest of Colombia—replicating north-south power dynamics. It was the intellectual elite that crafted the idea of Bogotá as “South American Athens” at the end of the nineteenth century. This group saw themselves as belonging to a cultured society far above other Latin American cities, members of a lettered city that should direct the nation's future.

The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, issue 3699 (March 26, 1781): 3

THEATRICAL INTELLIGENCE.

On Saturday evening Mrs. Cowley's last Comedy, presented three weeks since, under the title of The World As It Goes, was restored to the Theatre under the new name of SECOND THOUGHTS ARE BEST. The author had made a great variety of emendations, by omission, alteration, and insertion, in most of which she gave testimony of a promptitude of ability and an apt judgment; but unfortunately, not only the foundation of her dramatic building, but the superstructure itself, was ill chosen, undramatically conceived, and both uninterestingly and offensively executed; every attempt to ornament and embellish, served therefore, (like white silk stockings worn by a bandy-legged chimneysweeper,) rather to expose than to conceal the deformity of the whole, which, as we asserted in our first critique on the original play, was too replete with radical defects to be easily cured. The theatre was extremely crouded, and the audience were put into good humour by a laughable prologue, in which the new title of the Piece was played upon with some pleasantry. Soon after the performance began, it became pretty evident that the persons who filled the theatre were divided into three parties; the candid and unbiassed, the determined advocates of the author, and her no less determined opposers. We mention the three descriptions in this order, because the first must strike every man as the most respectable, the second appeared to be the most numerous, and the third deserved to be put in the back ground: from their contemptible display of venomous industry, in the cause of malice and persecution. In the early part of the representation, a struggle arose between the two latter parties, where each was guilty of the same cause of reprehension: the friends of the author, in their eagerness to applaud, made the theatre resound with plaudits, where no praise was due; and her enemies, with just as little judgment, seemed determined, that the candid and impartial should not be allowed a momentary opportunity of hearing whether the play did or did not deserve condemnation.

The Pacifist and Just War Traditions

The word “pacifism” does not appear in most European languages until the early twentieth century. Before then there were ideas about peacemaking and peaceful living going back to the Gospels, if not sooner in the Jewish Bible, along with ideas corresponding to what came to be called “just war theory.” Premodern pacifism is sometimes called “irenicism,” since many of its proponents were not in all cases against a recourse to violence. (Above all, they were at best ambivalent about war against non-Christians.) But a recognizable strain of pacifism nevertheless persisted throughout the Christian era, and came to find one of its most original and influential expressions in the early sixteenth century—the same period as we have just looked at with regard to the Renaissance novella collection. “Survey the life of Christ from start to finish,” Erasmus wrote—Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, the leading light of Northern Humanism, and the most prominent of Renaissance pacifists—“and what else is it but a lesson in concord and mutual love? What do all this commandments and parables teach if not peace and love for one another?” Pacifism before the letter, it was, if you will: adherence to this total message, communicated in “commandments and parables,” however hard it may ever be to put it into practice, combined with a cautious optimism about what humans are capable of.

One way to look at early modern pacifism is to view it on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum would be brazen militarism, whether for its own sake or for the purposes of holy war, for glory or for domination, for honor or for pillage, in keeping with what we have seen called a “normativity” of violence in the Middle Ages. Next might come the militarism of civic republicanism, whose chief exponent was Machiavelli—militarism for the sake of civic self-defense, and thus also for the sake of encouraging liberty and virtù.

1. Asymmetrical Violence and Its Moral Economy

A village priest in Emilia-Romagna is tricked out of a mule he bought by three local men known to be robbers. The priest, named Scarpacifico (“fig shoe”), discovering that he has been duped, gets his revenge. First he tricks the robbers into buying a goat for 50 florins, a large sum, having caused them to believe the goat has the magic power of delivering oral messages. They find out to their loss that the goat is only a goat. Next, when they return to the priest's house to murder him, he tricks them into buying what they think is a magic bagpipe for the very large sum of two hundred florins, and then into stabbing their own wives to death. (They thought that blowing the bagpipe up their wives’ asses would bring them back to life.) The robbers respond by abducting the priest, tying him up in a sack, and preparing to kill him by throwing him into a river. But the priest gets out of danger. While the robbers go off to check for their safety, a shepherd comes by and espies the priest, and at the priest's call for help the shepherd lets him out of the sack. Now the priest tricks the shepherd into climbing into the sack in his place and allowing himself to be tied up, making the shepherd believe that in the end he will get to marry a princess. The robbers return and throw the sack into the river, but as they walk away from the scene they see the priest, tending a large flock of sheep. The priest tells them that when he was tied in a sack and thrown into the river, spirits of the seas caused him safely to return to land and acquire the sheep. “Ah! Father Scarpacifico,” they cry out, “will you do us a good turn? Will you put us into sacks and throw us in the river? Then, you see, we shall no longer have need to be highwaymen and rogues, and will live as honest shepherds.” The priest complies, ties them up in sacks, and throws them into the river.

Sir,

This Comedy call’d “The World as it goes, or a Party at Montpelier” is intended to be perform’d at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, by permission of the Rt. Honorable the Earl of Hertford.

Fairfax. [Mr. Lee Lewes]

Sir Charles Danvers. [Mr. Lewis]

Sparwell. [Mr. Wilson]

Grubb. [Mr. Quick]

Bronze. [Mr. Edwin]

von Irkin. [Mr. Wewitzer]

Murtagh. [Mr. Egan]

Monk. [Mr. Poile]

Le Rouge. [Mr. L’Estrange]

Le Gout.

Will.

Landlord.

Sidney Grubb. [Mrs. Inchbald]5

Lady Danvers. [Miss Younge]

Mrs. Sparwell. [Mrs. Mattocks]

Molly Grubb. [Mrs. Webb]

Jervis.

Countess. [Miss Ambrose]

Abbess. [Mrs. Platt]

Nell. [Mrs. Davenett]

Child.

1. I will begin with two extracts from the book Kanzi's Primal Language, a discussion of a famous study of the language abilities of bonobo:

I found such descriptions striking. I want to highlight the form of the behaviour here considered relevant to the claim that Kanzi might have language. What I have in mind comes out most clearly by contrast with examples from the more ‘scientific’ approach adopted in earlier work with Kanzi. Typical tests here were of this form:

The crucial contrasts highlighted by Segerdahl et al. might be summarised in terms of two features of the later research. First, the research involves giving a central place to the idea of a ‘culture’: ‘First-language acquisition focuses on doing things together, on living together while communicating’ (22).

1. A television nature programme some years ago contained a striking sequence in which a giant squid was under threat from some other creature (no doubt a human being with a video camera). The squid responded in a way that struck me immediately and powerfully as one of fear. Part of what was striking in this sequence was the way in which it was possible to see in the behaviour of a creature physically so very different from human beings an emotion that was so unambiguously and specifically one of fear. While I would guess that most who saw this film would see in the squid's response something similar to what I saw I cannot offer a description of that behaviour that might help to convince someone who has not seen the film and who is sceptical: a description such that they might agree that if it really did behave like that, then it was certainly correct to ascribe fear to it. That I cannot do so is not, I think, merely a reflection of my very limited descriptive powers. It is a reflection of the fact that there is no more fundamental description of the squid's response than ‘fleeing in fear’: no other form of description that underlies, and so might provide support for, this one. My aim in this essay is to establish this point and to bring out its significance for two very different ways in which philosophers have spoken of our ascriptions of sensations and emotions to non-human creatures.

In the first chapter of Animal Liberation, Peter Singer offers what he takes to be an essential preliminary to the argument of the rest of the book. If we are to show that we have a moral obligation not to cause unnecessary suffering to animals, we must, Singer suggests, first establish that animals are capable of suffering.