The best part of writing an honors thesis on Restoration comedy is being allowed to read 30-page articles about fops. Or is that the worst part? The senior who devotes a year to the genre has more or less declared her allegiance to the absurd. It's hard to persuade anyone that characters called Lord Foppington and Sir Fopling Flutter are to be taken seriously. Frankly, if you told Vanbrugh and Etherege that their work had inspired dozens of scholarly studies, they would laugh until they cried.
Over winter break, two friends and I were working, or "working," on our theses in a coffeehouse. One friend was reading about postcolonialism; another was studying theories of consciousness. I was giggling my way through Etherege's She Would if She Could. My friends glanced up from their articles, and I tried to explain the joke: "So there's this knight, Sir Oliver Cockwood--"
I'm afraid I got no further before we dissolved into hysterics.
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O! That was grand!
ReplyDeleteI like the idea that you have committed yourself to absurdity; what an excellent thing to commit to!
Indeed! That and disciplined hedonism.
ReplyDeleteThere is a chance that I will call you soonish (though you are busy and I am busy, so it may be a doomed endeavor).