The London Merchant - George Lillo PDF

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Riassunto e analisi The London Merchant di George Lillo con annesso saggio critico "Dispensing nationhood and the consuming nation in The London Merchant" di James Cruise...

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THE LONDON MERCHANT – George Lillo – first performed in 1731 The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell, is a play wright by George Lillo. This is a tragedy that follows the downfall of a young apprentice due to his association with a prostitute. It is remarkable for its use of middle and working class characters. It became one of the most popular plays of the century. George Lillo was born in London in 1693. His play is a 17th century ballad about a murder in Shropshire. The ballad follows the adventures of George Barnwell, who engages in an affair with the prostitute Sarah Millwood. After stealing money from his employer to fund his relationship, Barnwell robs and murders his uncle. Both Barnwell and Millwood are arrested and executed for their crimes. Characters -Thorowgood: a London merchant; -George Barnwell: apprentice to Thorowgood; -Trueman: another apprentice to Thorowgood; -Blunt: servant of Millwood; -Barnwell: uncle of George; -Maria: daughter of Thorowgood; -Sarah Millwood: a lady of pleasure; -Lucy: servant of Millwood -Officers with their attendants, keeper of the prison, executioner and footmen (domestico). Plot ACT I: Sarah Millwood schemes to find some innocent young man to seduce and exploit for money. She observes George Barnwell in town, and invites him to her house for supper. She realizes that he works for the wealthy merchant Thorowgood so decides to seduce Barnwell with irresistible flattery. He succumbs her wiles (sottrefugi) and she convinces him to steal from his boss. ACT II: George feels he has betrayed Thorowgood by disobeying his curfew and also for his fornication with Millwood. She discovers that he no longer wants anything to do with her, so quickly things of a lie to tell George to keep he plan going. She tells him that the man who provides her with housing found out about their tryst (appuntamento segreto) and is evicting (sfrattando) her because of it. This evokes new feelings of guilt from George, so he decides to steal a large sum of money from his employer’s funds to give it to her. ACT III: George feels unworthy of his kind master, so he runs away and leaves a note for Trueman confessing his crime. Having no place to go, he turns to Millwood for help, but she refuses him and convinces him that she truly loves him but he has to steal from his rich uncle and to kill him. George veils his face and attacks his uncle with a knife. As he lies dying, uncle prays both for his nephew and for his murderer, not knowing that they are the same person. Overcome with sorrow, George reveals himself to his uncle, and before he dies, the uncle forgives his murderous nephew. ACT IV: Lucy revealed Thorowgood the truth and he rushes to exit and tells her to keep watch on Millwood’s house. Later, George returns there upset, and with bloody hands. Upon realizing that he did not take any money or property, Millwood sends for the police and has George arrested for murder. Two of Millwood’s servants, Lucy and Blunt, who were aware of the plan from the beginning, have her arrested as well. Both George and Millwood are sentenced to death. In the last scene of Act 4 Millwood expresses to Thorowgood that she is not remorseful for what they have done. ACT V: Millwood blamed society and men for what she has become, but accepts her fate with passion. Thorowgood and Trueman console and forgive George. Trueman ends showing that the play was to learn how to do the right things in our own lives. THEMES -morality and ethics: morality in theater was an important issue during the Restoration and the 18th century (1642 – 1660 closure of London theatres). According to Lillo, the audience should learn from the play: Barnwell is at his essence a good character, despite his crimes, and the audience should sympathize with him and learn from him. He is unable to eradicate his error, and any attempts he makes to fix his

situation end up making it worse. He digs himself into a deeper hole until eventually he commits the ultimate crime of murdering his uncle. Millwood is the deviation of the system, she is not offered the same redemption that is granted to him at the end of the play. -status of the merchant: Lillo emphasizes the central role of the merchant in society: merchant holds society together, builds the empire and helps ensure the peace. “The London merchant” is an early example of bourgeois tragedy. Tragedy was a genre reserved for elite and has now been applied to the middle class. Thorowgood is a character who exemplifies all of the desired values that a merchant should have. -exchange and excess: exchange and trade are not only important issues to the merchant, but also metaphors throughout the play. The bond between Barnwell and Trueman, for example, shows homoerotic implications as well as means that the exchange created by merchants helps to sustain society. Excess is another economic element in the play, mostly exhibited through passion, theft, murder. Unlike trade, passion has nothing stopping it from going to the extreme. In the play Millwood also embodies this excess: she stimulates behaviour of exchange but there is no exchange at all. -apprenticeship: Apprenticeship was very popular at the time of this play, as there were 10-20.000 apprentices in the city of London. One day each year, usually around Easter, all of them were taken to the theatre and shown a play for apprentice day. In 1731, Lillo’s play was performed for the first time for apprentices and it continued to be played until 1819. It was very important because it showed how important was for them to obey their masters. Apprenticeships were both educational and economical exchanges: 2 men would exchange a young man. The apprentice was taken into the home of the master and became a member of his family; the master became a type of surrogate father for him. Thorowgood is an ideal master, the ideal example of proper exchange and trade: he is a surrogate father for Barnwell and he cries over Barnwell’s death. The field of Apprenticeship was mostly dominated by men. In the play we see a strong moral bond between the men, a sort of brotherhood, while the female Millwood is not allowed to take part in this. So she tries to get revenge by severing (troncare) all such ties that Barnwell has, putting him into the same position as her. PRODUCTIONS: this play was staged 96 times from 1731 and 1741 and was very popular with English theatregoers of the time, but its popularity fell off soon after 1800. ANALYSIS The focus of the story is in apprentice, being George Barnwell and Trueman the dichotomy of this class: the one, Trueman, was a model apprentice, and George was the apprentice led astray by the wiles of women. Thorowgood is the master: he is not only fair and kind to his apprentices, he also treats them with dignity and respect. Lillo presented complicated social issue in a simply way, in order to make it easy for the masses to identify with the characters. The London Merchant marked the introduction of the bourgeois tragedy with a new idea of acquisition through exchange, rather than conquest. From an economic point of view, the plays focuses on the effects that capitalism has had on people (even on women) who are its victims through no fault of their own. Barnwell is shown to be Millwood’s victim, but in the larger picture of the society, Millwood is the victim of capitalism. Lillo was a solid member of the bourgeois class and an avid participant in capitalism. Sarah refuses to be victimized as a woman and a whore, so she is more compelling (convincente) candidate to wear the title of The London Merchant than even Thorowgood; her rebellion against the hierarchy of women in society continues to death. At the end of the play there was a gallows scene (impiccagione) that was cut, it was a reflection of the high number of public executions taking place at the time. ESSAY: “Dispensing nationhood and the consuming nation in The London Merchant” – James Cruise The idea of nation of Lillo figures as an instrument of government, which power is autonomous and inviolable. In our own time we feel the nation not like an entity as like an image, a perception, or a shared belief. It can also be regarded as an impersonal representation, a product. The London Merchant signifies that not all characters will fit in, their sense of communion and belonging is left incomplete. It’s clear that nationhood was already a complex issue: Lillo stands in fact at a crossroads looking back to the England’s mercantilist past or ahead to political economy and marketplaces.

The national politics figures prominently from the start of the play, in this way the nation serves as an abstract model of virtue and goodness (virtù e purezza). The merchants have used their power to ensure England’s integrity and obviously to reach their own interests. Lillo avoids the disputes between mercantile and landed interests in England. In Act III, in an exchange between master and pupil, Thorowgood and Trueman, we learn of the benevolence of traders. Merchants help their native country to become rich. Lillo’s picture of commerce is perfectly inserted in the Elizabethan era in which the play is set. In the 18th century, in fact, English writers still praised Elizabeth for introducing the nation to the world of international trade. Her policy marked a watershed in the development of England’s national and commercial identity. Thus at 2 critical points, the beginning and middle of the play (Act I and III), Lillo declares his allegiance (fedeltà) to this earlier age. The play begins with the Spanish invasionary designs, that are thwarted (sventati). This does not mean that the risk is finished because it assumed a human form in the person of Millwood who, speaking with Lucy, affirmed that she would have liked that the Spanish conquests were complete because they were rich. By betraying her own nation for another, she reawakens the political threat of the Spanish Armada by quickly invading the person of Barnwell. Her infection spreads to Barnwell who infects those around him. Millwood’s appropriation of a Spanish identity marks her irrevocably excluded. By touching her, George betrays his nation. For what concerns George, his character is uncomplicated, and the description is limited perhaps for the apolitical role he must perform. George has a fractional identity. A reader reading the play for the first time might imagine that Barnwell is the London merchant himself, which is not. At stake (in gioco), is the relationship between whole and parts, between nation and citizen. From this perspective, parts literally make the whole into a network of intersections. According to Lillo’s point of view, merchants could do nothing wrong: their knowledge and expertise becomes the exclusive agency of the nation and, in turn, impose rules and regulations upon others. Lillo partitions his representational structure into 2 elements (the political and the theological) as if they were present in the same identical way. Of all the characters who do have a physical role in the play, the most unregulated is Millwood. She is hardly an aristocrat, she is a sexual trader, a woman of pleasure and incarnates life with all rules suspended. Ultimately she is as toothless (impotente) as the Spanish before English merchants. She bears a great weight in a domestic tragedy, because she is generically mismatched: her distance from the merchant ranks is about the same as the aristocracy’s. She is too compex and bold (audace) for a social group that prefers rule-driven organization; her unruliness makes her not to wallow in misfortune (di non piangersi addosso). She exposes the hypocrisy of men so as to universalize the injustice of propertyless women. By doing so, Millwood becomes a victim whose disregard for polite regulations makes her to Thorowgood what he is to the aristocracy. In act 4 her accusers surround her and she impugns (mette in dubbio) its keepers with the same hypocrisy and cruelty with an impolite idiom. She challenges males in the audience to recognize her as a type awaiting fulfillment (un tipo di atteso soddisfacimento). Thorowgood deflects (Evita) her indictment, so that he doesn’t have to answer himself. In act 5 we see that the value of critique serves as something momentary and fleeting. As the act begins, Thorowgood has already put behind himself the critique of Millwood and calls a cleric to minister the jailed Barnwell. Although Barnwell’s fate is tied to Millwood’s, he lacks her heroic dimension and is vulnerable to his own weaknesses. Once he transgresses, he sees himself eternally alienated. An other important feature of George is that his own family history has been broken and fragmented, so he became a son to his uncle but, after that and long before his bloody deed, he has found a father in Thorowgood and a brother in Trueman (who represents the apprenticeship in family terms). For George, rule-laden (oppresso dale regole) as he is, there is virtue and vice, and nothing intermediary, but he finds himself in circumstances that blur (offuscano) such distinctions. So he is caught in this dilemma, not able to master it (padroneggiarlo). To understand the source of his despair we must turn again more directly to the idea of the nationhood. George’s version of the ideal nation seems even more dated than Lillo’s: a throwback to government, rather than an embrace of nation. This ought to make him even more docile as an apprentice bound by

regulations, but he has also an unexpressed side that we can discover from his need for physical attachments of his susceptibility to affection. His greatest fear is one of not belonging. Millwood recognizes this side of George, a side that Thorowgood fails to see and can only address obliquely. NATION, for George, lies somewhere between politics and theology, without ever fully being incorporated into either. Barnwell’s execution is necessary because it preserves the integrity of representation that Lillo has crafted in service to a national ideology. George, in sum, must die because his divided loyalty has dared to expose how private need addles (confonde) public productivity and, according to mercantilist theory, how the selfinterested citizenry (cittadinanza) threatens the elitist model of national interests. Lillo’s message is that feeling personalizes ideology. Whereas Barnwell loses self-control quickly, Maria does it slowly, with much pain. She is a generous, independent-minded person, who knows what she wants but cannot have it. The reasons are: she is a woman and she doesn’t want to disappoint her father. The irony is that, as the daughter of a rich merchant, she has even less mobility than Millwood. There is only one family in The London Merchant, and Maria belongs to it, although it is a family already divided: her mother has died well before the play begins. If a nation ought to be a family, it could be so only in metaphor. The erosion of the father-daughter relationship begins early in act 1 when, in the only real exchange between father and daughter, Maria politely declines having the husband chosen by her father. She is not so different from Millwood. Refusing her father’s choice she feels in fact far (like Millwood) from the world her father represents; like Millwood again, she has no profession into which she can channel her intelligence. In act 5 George is shocked to learn of her love for him. After Barnwell has stolen Thorowgood’s money for Millwood, Maria replenishes the stolen money and asks Trueman to keep the secret. When she learns he is in jail, she rushes to him and her passion for him is not a mystery anymore. As a consequence, the relationship between she and her father ceases. The problem Maria poses for the play is that she has done nothing wrong. What she reveals is the fundamental division in belonging that obtains under a national ideology that purports to declare providential necessitarianism and civil society as identical. No single character in the play is equipped to minister to the mysteries of interior life (wellspring of unbelonging). The cleric who attends Barnwell in prison cures George’s soul by having him renounce his sins of the flesh. Millwood, on the other hand, remains defiant (ribelle), but the flesh defines her peccancy. Thorowgood can only judge by external actions: the gestures of belonging. As Barnwell awaits death, Thorowgood speaks with him (or to the audience?): he wants to impress his listener with how the lives of the cleric and merchant overlap (si sovrappongono). These lives are similar, but not identical; the priest sees the material world as immaterial, whereas the merchant views riches ans power as essential; one rejects the trappings of the world, the other capitalizes on those trappings. What remains intact is the end, not the means, which is divided into and polarized by extremes. While The London Merchant attempts to communicate the denial (rifiuto) of self-interest in the pursuit of a greater, more benevolent abstract nation, it demonstrates through its parts how punishing that model of civic identity is for those who live under it. Interest is international, national and personal: a form dispensed and a from consumed. It is important to bear in mind that this is a domestic tragedy where the nation’s interests collide with those of personal need. In the end, a secure nation means nothing to Barnwell, Maria, or Millwood. As events turn out, there is no compelling reason for Lillo to have chosen the Elizabethan Age as the historical backdrop for his play. The reasons may be: -that Elizabeth enjoyed a good press long after her death; -This historical setting retains the aura of a Golden Age. For the most feeling character into his play, Maria, the price of belonging is a living death....