While Dan Stark’s love interest, Martha McDowell, has an all too realistic and still common back-story, Stark’s feels a bit contrived. Rather than a comedy of manners, it is a manners tragedy, if there is such a rude beast. Upholding a social more and contract certainly is common in this time, in the degrees to which Stark goes and the depth of his perceived duties. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes a manners comedy: “Often the governing social standard is morally trivial but exacting. The plot of such a comedy, usually concerned with an illicit love affair or similarly scandalous matter, is subordinate to the play’s brittle atmosphere, witty dialogue, and pungent commentary on human foibles.”
Flip that over, and you have Stark’s and Martha’s sad dilemma. In a time and place where social standards are mostly in the mind and not in action and existence is a daily battle, niceties like manners scarcely matter. But perhaps that was the whole point. The larger picture is one of the pathos of vicious, greedy men violating higher standards of conduct, leading the morally upright to take judgment and punishment into their unofficial hands. Crude, effective, and hard action is tempered by the soft romance that blooms within.
Article comments
1 - Carol Buchanan
Thank you, Georganna! I'm always interested to see how different people react to God's Thunderbolt, and I appreciate the depth of thought you put into the review. And no, I'm not thinking "At last"; I know you're one of the busier people on the planet.