The rich court the poor

Role play classes are my favourite. Monday was spectacular. 

The twelfth grade received this prompt: 

"A rich person courts a poor person."

The role plays showed both genders in each role. In every single role play the poor person was lower than the rich person on stage - some knelt, some were seated begging, others were low down in order to do a chore like washing the floor or shining someone's shoe. During feedback, students identified dynamics that come into play in such relations

- the skepticism of the poor person

- the desire in the rich person to play the "saviour" role or be powerful

- the rich person's desire to escape from the constraints of his own society, from the people who are all like him

- the seeming "purity" of poor people compared with rich people. Saja pointed out that in order to get rich, the rich people may have had to do bad things, rendering them impure. 

- the likelihood that the poor person will say yes, because his family will approve of an advantageous match

We then looked at how the Duchess courts Antonio, saying to him:

Sir, this goodly roof of yours, is too low built; 
I cannot stand upright in't nor discourse,
Without I raise it higher; raise yourself;
Or, if you please, my hand to help you: so.

They identified the symbolism of Antonio's taking her hand to rise up. He is rising in both stature and social class by agreeing to be wooed by and married to her. But he still hesitates:

Ambition, madam, is a great man's madness, 
That is not kept in chains, and close-pent rooms, 
But in fair lightsome lodgins, and is girt
With the wild noise of prattling visitants,
Which makes it lunatic beyond all cure. 
Conceive not I am so stupid but I aim
Whereto your favours tend: but he's a fool,
That being a-cold, would thrust his hands i'th' fire 
To warm them.

The students were so great with their dissection of his words here - looking at how ambition is a madness and prompts men to put their hands right in the fire. Antonio's wariness against ambition contrasts with the duchess's flippant attitude toward the threat her brothers pose to a peaceful union:

Do not think of [my brothers]:
All discord without this circumference
Is only to be pitied, and not fear'd:

Yet, should they know it, 
time will easily Scatter the tempest. 

Her motivation in pursuing this unapproved love may be that her passions are too strong to be contained, and she knows Antonio will never pursue her. As she says,

Now she pays it.
The misery of us that are born great!
We are forc'd to woo, because none dare woo us; 
And as a tyrant doubles with his words,
And fearfully equivocates, so we
Are forc'd to express our violent passions
In riddles, and in dreams, and leave the path
Of simple virtue, which was never made
To seem the thing it is not. Go, go brag
You have left me heartless; mine is in your bosom: 
I hope 'twill multiply love there. You do tremble:
 Make not your heart so dead a piece of flesh,
To fear, more than to love me. Sir, be confident: 
What is't distracts you? This is flesh and blood sir; 
'Tis not the figure cut in alabaster,
Kneels at my husbands tomb. Awake, awake, man! 
I do here put off all vain ceremony,
And only do appear to you a young widow
That claims you for her husband, and like a widow, 
I use but half a blush in's.

I love watching these students sift through and make sense of what these characters are saying. When they are getting at what a character says, I have the impression that they're getting at some core truth of human experience. So many speeches of Webster's quiver with relevance to this condition we all live. The continued relevance of the Duchess's, Antonio's and Bosola's feelings and behaviours is staggering and humbling. 

The Duchess and Antonio wed under Cariola's eye, but she seems to look askance at the man and wife as they exit the hall:

Whether the spirit of greatness, or of woman 
Reign most in her, I know not; but it shews

A fearful madness: I owe her much of pity. 

Cariola presides over the secret wedding of the Duchess and her Master of Household, Antonio