Morality play

Abstract: I saw Crash on a DVD, which I recommend, especially for the extended commentary by the writer-director, Paul Haggis, who wrote Million Dollar Baby and the co-writer Bobby Moresco, and Don Cheadle, who starred in Hotel Rwanda, and plays an L.A. Detective who is investigating an accident in the film. Cheadle said he was struggling not to laugh at some of dialogue which is definitely not PC but real. The dialogue between Larenz Tate and Chris “Ludacris” Bridge is like a running commentary of two hip-hop stand up comics. Humor is the great equalizer providing some relief to this very edgy production. Crash is a complicated film about power and race relations in L.A. The opening scenes are hypnotic. It is pitch black and the car headlights are white and yellow, dramatizing the color contrasts with the stunning cinematography of J. Michael Muro and creating an atmosphere where anything can happen. The use of filters, shooting into the sun, using slow motion to accentuate the terror of racism and exploitation is superb. The urban sprawl of car-dependant Los Angelinos, with drivers secluded in their own socio-economic sphere, does have its irony, sometimes comical and other times terrifying. “In L.A. no one touches you. We missed that so much that we crash into each other,” says Cheadle’s character. The script confronts the prejudice and nastiness of racism in all of its forms. Everyone is racist. Far from being a polemic, the film is not your ordinary action picture. It is hard to pin it down to a genre. There are various labels that could apply; it is a morality play, fable, nightmare, and tragic comedy. To me the key element in this film is that it defies stereotyping which is at the heart of prejudice. Via interlocking stories it highlights the soul searching and spiritual wasteland of Los Angeles with its mixture of cultural and racial diversity. There are cops and robbers, blacks, whites, Latinos, Koreans, Chinese, Persians and Hispanics all exploiting one another without sensing what they are doing. The Koreans are mistaken for Chinese, the Persians for Arabs by the color of their skin, or their inability to pronounce certain words, or simply by their own anger which blinds them to the

Abstract: Peter's book on the genres of complaint and satire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance occasionally uses Gower as an example of the "moralizing, quasi-sermonic bent" (51) typical of complaint literature. Peter suggests that Gower's attempt to take the "middel weie" between lust and lore, or between courtly love and moral teaching, was "like mixing oil and water" (52) so that much of the CA is "almost unreadable" (52). Peter mines the CA for some of the staple ingredients of complaint literature, including the nostalgic description of the Golden Age, the frequent reminder of the coming end times (forecast by the statue of Nebuchadnezzar), the conception of a retributive God, and the critique of the rich. Peter also uses Gower as an example of how the topics of complaint literature influenced the development of the morality play and (later) tragedy. [CvD]

Abstract: The Long Fifteenth Century is intended as a companion volume to Douglas Gray's ground-breaking Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose and incorporates a bibliography of his published writings. Gray's anthology revolutionized critical appreciation of English and Scottish literature of the 'long fifteenth century' from the death of Chaucer to the Reformation, but the literature of the period as a whole remains much under-read, undervalued, and under-studied. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars in the field, bring to the fore the power of underrated writers, restore to the period writings often attributed to other centuries, open up new possibilities in neglected genres, offer radical rereadings of some more familiar works, and demonstrate how closely the literature of the period is bound up with political and social conditions. Written in honour of Douglas Gray, to mark his long and distinguished tenure of the J.R.R. Tolkein Professorship of English Literature and Language at Oxford university, the 15 essays in this volume portray the long fifteenth century as a major period of literature in its own right. They provide a comprehensive survey of fifteenth-century literature in print, from the morality play to the ballad, verse forms to prose romances, including Chaucer, Lydgate, Skelton, and Hoccleve, along with essays on the Middle French Poets and Scottish writings of the period.

Abstract: The most comprehensive paperback edition of EVERYMAN available, with introduction and extensive notes. Miracle Plays were a popular form of entertainment throughout the Middle Ages and part of the poetic and dramatic tradition on which Shakespeare drew, and EVERYMAN is perhaps the best known morality play of them all. This edition also includes a representative selection of fourteen other important Miracle Plays.