Early baroque synthesis of rationality and sensuality in tragedies by J. Ford, F. Beaumont and D. Fletcher

Abstract

The article focuses on the poetics of the early Baroque tragedies. Exaltation, as an important element of the poetics of early Baroque tragedies, is analyzed. In the early Baroque tragedies the struggle between evil and good, bestiality in men, the fury in human souls find a positive resolution, which is expressed by theological sacred terms. 

In the Middle Ages, the lovers do not mix religious and erotic motives. Such mixture is perceived as blasphemy. In Renaissance literature, the artist seeks to capture and depict the neoplatonic conception of love. There is a firmly fixed limit between the erotic and spiritual spheres of love, heavenly beauty and love can not be compared with earthly, sensual love. Thus there is distinction between spiritual love and physical love in Renaissance drama.  In the Baroque era, this division disappears. Catholic meditation is the example of baroque meditation where the mystical and erotic emotions merge. Religious ecstasy is brought out as sexual ecstasy. In Baroque tragedies religious fulfillment is compared to sexual ecstasy. The pleasure gained from the concepts is the same. It is a shocking concept especially considering this is done immediately after the Renaissance period. Such a sensual exaltation caused a negative attitude to Baroque by some researchers who called it sophisticated eroticism. However, when analyzing this aspect of early baroque tragedies, critics should not forget that in the aesthetic system of Baroque the similarity between religious and erotic ecstasy is conceived as the merger of the human soul with God.

The sense of love is manifested in Baroque tragedy not only because it combines spiritual and carnal, Platonic and rational, emotional and rational, but because it serves as a means of ecstatic mystical unity with an entity, God.

The characters of the tragedies by J. Ford, F. Beaumont and D. Fletcher have medieval ideas about the destructive power of passion, which is inherent in the art of mannerism. However, it is possible to combine the spiritual and the carnal in emotional sense, as well as its ability to restore harmony in case sins are regretted and therefore forgiven. Thus, in the Baroque tragedy there is a synthesis of medieval and Renaissance concepts of love with the leading role of the Renaissance tendencies.