Blind Beggar Research Articles

상상력, 무로부터의 창조

This essay attempts to read three scenes of The Prelude by William Wordsworth, using as guiding thread what Kir Kuiken articulates with regard to the concept of imagination in his book, Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism. In order to bring Kuiken’s articulation of imagination to bear on the psychoanalytic concept of the void of the Thing, the essay will make a detour through the notion of creation ex nihilo that Jacques Lacan introduces in his book, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The notion of creation ex nihilo should not be taken to imply the process in which something is created from nothing. At stake here is nothing less than the simultaneity between the construction of the symbolic meaning and the introduction of a void. What Lacan elaborates regarding the creation ex nihilo is worth dwelling upon in that it allows us to problematize the opposition of subject and nature, past and present, whole and part which has functioned as the basic theme in the previous readings of The Prelude. The analysis of Wordsworth’s recounting of his passage across the Alps in book six of the Prelude is centered primarily on the way in which the missed crossing of the Alps is (re-)constructed in the ode to the imagination that follows. The episode of the blind beggar in book seven is especially important for grasping the logic that makes the ‘whole’ and the ‘part’ inextricable from but at the same time irreducible to each other. The reading of book eight begins with a consideration of the two “nows” in the passage of Wordsworth’s entrance into London. This leads us to formulate the singular way in which the first “now” is intermingled with the second “now,” instead of trying to figure out the extent to which the significance of the first “now” can be restored through the second “now.”

Analisis Sosiologi Sastra Cerpen “Yang Enak Dipandang” Karya Ahmad Tohari

This research analyzes one of Ahmad Tohari's short stories entitled Eyes that are Good to Look at using a sociological literary analysis approach. This approach is used to determine the extent to which literary works are able to display social realities and problems that occur in society. Through the figure of Mirta Ahmad Tohari depicts the hard life of a blind beggar facing the ins and outs of life. The description of Mirta's suffering is a reality of life that is often encountered by lower class people.

‘The consonance of concepts’ <i>bormochet</i> [mumbles] - <i>prorochit</i> [prophesies] in V. Nabokov’s <i>The Gift</i> [Dar

The article sets out to reveal intertextual connections between Nabokov’s novel The Gift [Dar] and the theoretical and literary legacy of Russian futurism perceived through Heavy Lyre [Tyazhyolaya lira], a collection of verse by V. Khodasevich. To do so, the author attempts to demonstrate the implementation of the method called ‘the consonance of concepts’ in The Gift, with the example of the concepts bormochet [mumbles] — prorochit [prophesies], establish their intertextual links to Heavy Lyre, and define the constructive role of ‘the consonance of concepts’ in Nabokov’s works. The extract from the novel that proves crucial for the article’s objective describes F. Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s encounter with a blind beggar, who asks him for money. The extract reveals a reminiscence of the Futurist method of ‘the consonance of concepts’ with the example of the consonant words bos [barefoot] — bog [god], which, in turn, help to decipher the semantic implications of the bormochet — prorochit motifs. V. Cherkasov also identifies the method’s literary and critical functions: pointing to its constructive nature in Khodasevich’s Heavy Lyre, Nabokov reveals the book’s modernist origins.

Envisioning Blindness in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Long after the event, Jacques-Louis David vividly recalled the sudden revelation of the true principles of art that he experienced in Italy during the year 1779: ‘I felt as if I had undergone an operation for cataract’.1 This statement lays claim on David’s behalf to one of ‘the two great mythical experiences’ considered by Foucault to exemplify the Enlightenment commitment to seeing the world afresh: ‘the man born blind restored to light’.2 This figure owed his prominence in eighteenth-century culture to Molyneux’s Problem, that is, the question of whether or not a congenitally blind person cured by means of cataract surgery would recognize by sight objects already familiar to the touch, which was widely debated after Locke posed it in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689). David’s appropriation of the myth of sight regained needs, however, to be set against the concern with its loss or lack that...

Problem wykluczenia społecznego w kościelnej posłudze słowa

Problemem społecznym, na który szczególnie zwraca uwagę papież Franciszek, jest wykluczenie społeczne. Nie chodzi w tym nowym zjawisku o wykorzystywanie ludzi, ale o całkowite odrzucenie; powiedzenie komuś, że jest do niczego niepotrzebny. Takie traktowanie człowieka jest całkowicie sprzeczne z Dobrą Nowiną Jezusa Chrystusa, który wyklucza „wykluczenie świadome” kogokolwiek. Artykuł podejmuje tę kwestię, a także omawia „wykluczenie nieświadome”, które wynika z zastosowania języka, który nie jest wystarczająco inkluzywny. Zadaniem głosicieli słowa Bożego jest podejmować problem wykluczenia i ukazywać, że Jezus utożsamił się z wykluczonymi. Ewangelia dostarcza przykładu przeobrażenia społecznego wskutek interwencji Jezusa. Historia niewidomego żebraka Bartymeusza z Jerycha jest paradygmatem dla przepowiadania na rzecz integracji wykluczonych.

An Uncanny Reading of the Discharged Soldier episode and the Blind Beggar episode in William Wordsworth’s The Prelude

이 글의 목적은 자크 라캉의 응시 개념을 토대로, 윌리엄 워즈워스의 『서곡』에 실려 있는 퇴역 군인 에피소드와 눈먼 거지 에피소드를 다시 읽어보는 데 있다. 워즈워스는 거의 전 작품에 걸쳐서 공동체로부터 배제된 자들과의 만남, 그리고 이 만남이 화자에게 초래하는 불안, 더 나아가 화자 자신의 분열의 가능성을 집요하게 탐색하는데, 이는 주체/대상이라는 기존의 대립구조에 근거하여 온전하게 설명될 수 없다. 주체/대상, 또는 관찰자/관찰대상의 대립구조가 아니라 주체-대상의 관계 속에 함축된 근원적 비대칭성을 강조하는 라캉의 응시 개념이 워즈워스시 읽기에 필요한 이유가 여기에 있다. 눈먼 거지 에피소드와 관련된 기존 비평에서 가장 자주 제기되는 질문, 화자가 돌연 눈먼 거지에게 사로잡히는 이유는 무엇인가?에 대해 화자가 눈먼 거지의 응시라는 불가능한 대상과 동일시하기 때문이라는 대답이 제공될 수 있으며, 눈먼 거지의 응시와 맞닥뜨리는 순간 화자가 느낀 현기증과 불안은 이와 같은 동일시를 가능하게 하는 결정적 요인으로 설명될 수 있는 것이다. 퇴역 군인 에피소드 분석 과정에서 이 글은, 라캉의 응시 개념 속에서 구체화되는 주체와 대상의 근원적 비대칭성에 직면해서 주체가 스스로를 방어하기 위해 어떤 기제들을 동원하는지, 또 그의 방어 전략이 어떻게 실패하는지에 초점을 맞춘다.

Yeats's ‘Kiogen’: The Symbolic Structure of The Cat and the Moon

W.B. Yeats intended The Cat and the Moon to be a Japanese ‘Kiogen’, a farce or comedy presented between two Noh plays or within a single Noh play. In the inner drama of The Cat and the Moon, miracles happen to both of the emblematic characters, the Lame Beggar (the soul) and the Blind Beggar (the body). This essay analyzes the play from two distinctive perspectives: Yeats's use of the Japanese Noh and kyogen as his new model for the symbolic theatre, and the systematic use of sound symbolism which strengthens the symbolic structure of The Cat and the Moon.

'They Shall See His Face': Blindness in British India, 1850-1950.

This paper explores the social, medical, institutional and enumerative histories of blindness in British India from 1850 to 1950. It begins by tracing the contours and causes of blindness using census records, and then outlines how colonial physicians and observers ascribed both infectious aetiologies and social pathologies to blindness. Blindness was often interpreted as the inevitable consequence of South Asian ignorance, superstition and backwardness. This paper also explores the social worlds of the Blind, with a particular focus on the figure of the blind beggar. This paper further interrogates missionary discourse on ‘Indian’ blindness and outlines how blindness was a metaphor for the perceived civilisational inferiority and religious failings of South Asian peoples. This paper also describes the introduction of institutions for the Blind in addition to the introduction of Braille and Moon technologies.

The Image of Egypt in a Selection of Elizabethan & Jacobean Plays

<p>This study communicates the question of representational Egypt(ians) through textual analysis and close reading of Elizabethan and Jacobean selected plays, whose main concern is Egypt and Egyptians: Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, (All Is True)Henry VIII, and Cymbeline, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Jonson’s The Alchemist, Beaumont and Fletcher’s The False One, Daniel’s The Tragedie of Cleopatra, Chapman’s The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, and Webster’s The White Devil. It examines the process of labelling, the concomitant negative stereotyping of land and human, and its effect upon characters’ lives and future prospects as a result of the dramatists’ response to contemporary colonialist discourse that exaggerated the signs of cultural and epistemological difference.</p>

M by Fritz Lang (Germany, 1931) phenomenology of evil: A serial killer and his social group

In 1931 an unknown murderer of little girls (Peter Lorre) is terrorizing the city of Berlin. We see him entice a new victim, the little Elsie Beckmann, who is coming home from school: whistling a tune by Grieg, he buys her a balloon from a blind beggar. When her corpse is discovered, the police undertake a major mobilization aimed at seeking the serial killer in the criminal underworld; meanwhile, the ever more terrified population starts to see the dangerous murderer in everyone. Since the roundups and incursions into the seediest parts of town disturb the gangsters’ activities, the leaders of organized crime, headed by Schränker (Gustav Gründgens), take it upon themselves also to hunt down the solitary child‐killer, engaging the community of beggars. Every corner of the city is catalogued and sifted by the dual activity of the police and the gangsters. The ‘monster’, a former psychiatric patient, mild and harmless in manner, is finally tracked down via two parallel routes: the clue of a cigarette packet enables Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) to track down the serial killer's address, while the blind beggar recognizes the whistled tune. The murderer is identified by a ‘slap’ from a young criminal which leaves an M marked in chalk on a shoulder of the man's overcoat. Thus he is caught and undergoes a kind of trial at the hands of the gangsters who tie him up in order to lynch him, but they are interrupted by the arrival of the forces of law and order.

The Blind Beggar and the Discharged Soldier: A Partnership (Republished from "TWC", XXVI [Spring, 1995] 87-97)

The Blind Beggar and the Discharged Soldier: A Partnership (Republished from "TWC", XXVI [Spring, 1995] 87-97)

Wordsworth, Baudelaire, and the Limits of Poetic Insight

This essay traces Wordsworth's and Baudelaire's attempts to see into the lives of the unknown beggars they encountered on the streets of London and Paris and identifies those occasions on which both writers sought to appropriate the lives of the poor and vagrant for political ends. The essay argues that it is ultimately in those fleeting moments when the ability of the poet to enter into the lives of others is thwarted that the limits of a Romantic poetics can be established. In particular, the essay focuses on those occasions, in the work of both writers, when the process of identification with beggars — so sincerely wished for on account of its socio-political or aesthetic consequences — is interrupted, and the poet is exposed to an almost disabling moment of uncertainty. For Wordsworth, the essay contends, such moments occurred primarily when he moved out of the rural byways of England and into the crowded streets of London; for Baudelaire, they occurred when the “ineffable orgy” of the crowd failed to generate insights into the face of the stranger. For both writers, this failure of the poetic imagination on the streets of the metropolis, evident, for instance, in Wordsworth's encounter with the blind beggar in The Prelude and Baudelaire's with the old man in Les Sept Vieillards, marked the limit of a poetic activity based on identity, recognition, and empathy. The essay suggests that, while these moments were occasional and transitory, they delineate an imaginative terrain whose contours are visible in writers as diverse as Thomas De Quincey and T.S. Eliot.

Sign, Sensation and the Body in Wordsworth's “Residence in London”

This article argues that although a layer of readable or decodable experience is crucial to Wordsworth's London, and has been a fundamental focus for critics, it co-exists inextricably with a layer of tonal or extra-semantic experience (rhythm, pitch, intensity, lustre). While the former implies a mental separation between spectator and object, the latter implicates embodiment (the body's movements, sensations, responses and contacts) in the midst of city life. The poetic distance that is characteristically sought by Wordsworth to make sense of the city's chaotic and problematic signifying regime is hence undermined by the entangling of the poet's own body in the rhythms and tonalities of the urban space. In particular, two fundamental recuperations of the city's semantic monstrosity (the blind beggar and St. Bartholomew's fair) depend on steady and stable observing stances that are subverted when the body is read back into the poem. However, as I argue when considering the issue of a produced or culturally stratified body in the wider context of organism and natural communities, this is no accident. Eighteenth-century empiricism demands that habitual and stable structures of perception are constructed from a chaotic firmament of atomic sensations, vibrations and impressions. The shock and novelty of London in Wordsworth's poem exposes this, showing how fragile and reversible the terms of organic unity actually are.

<i>Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage Andrea Stevens Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage. By Peter Hyland. Ashgate, 2011. Pp. 1-170. $99.95. In seven lucid and tightly-argued chapters, Peter Hyland in Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage considers from a variety of angles the device of disguise, a theatrical convention more popular in the early modern period "than at any time since" (15). While there are stand-alone books on disguise, for example Michael Shapiro's stimulating account of the female page in Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (1995) and Victor Freeburg's still-useful Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (1915), there is no sustained exploration of the performance of disguise that also investigates the broader reasons why this convention so strongly appealed to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audiences. Hyland distinguishes his own approach from that of other critics as follows: "Rather than looking at disguise they have looked through it; in seeking to find what disguise means they have generally ignored what it is or does, or how it is seen" (11). Indeed, that throughout the book Hyland treats seriously the "play" aspect of playing without ever subordinating theatricality to literary or historical concerns means this work should be of significant interest to theatre practitioners as well as to scholars. Freely acknowledging the "many things we do not really know about early modern performance," Hyland nevertheless convincingly illuminates a "theatrical culture that is distant from our own" via the close reading of early modern plays that are now rarely if ever studied, let alone performed (2; 15). For Hyland, our "disproportionate" focus on Shakespeare, whose works "do not fully reflect the diversity and vitality of disguise plays, or the extent of the fascination they apparently held for their audiences," has been a significant obstacle (5). I consider his careful attention to plays considered marginal to be the book's greatest strength, and Hyland includes such "phenomenally popular" but relatively unknown plays as John a Kent and John a Cumber, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria and Look About You for consideration alongside more canonical works by Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton (33). The book's first two chapters thus paint a far richer picture of early modern theatrical culture from 1576-1642 than is typical. This date range allows him to note how key conventions change over time; for example, he suggests that by the Caroline period, the figure of the multi-disguiser acts with "benevolent or recuperative" intentions, whereas in the Jacobean period multi-disguisers are [End Page 233] often criminal tricksters like Face in The Alchemist (19). He dates the first instances of disguises that dupe the audience as well as the onstage characters to 1609, with Ben Jonson's girl who turns out to be a boy in Epicoene and Beaumont and Fletcher's boy who turns out to be a girl in Philaster. From this point on a number of plays adopt the device of the surprise disguise, although as Hyland observes, once familiar with the potential for disguises to trick the audience, the savvy theatregoer might well come to anticipate such coup de théâtre revelations of "true" identities. Hyland's next two chapters treat both the practical issues raised by early modern theatrical disguising and the management of the "revelation" moment when a disguise is deliberately—or ineptly, reluctantly, or accidentally—discarded. Suggesting that "it was the company, and not the playwright, that was the real creator of theatrical texts," Hyland argues that the device of disguise was an important vehicle for actorly virtuosity (12). Hyland speculates that the multi-disguise plays especially popular in the early 1600s were probably written to feature actors particularly skilled at impersonation, for example Edward Alleyn, who takes on a number of roles in The Blind Beggar of Alexandria including one that parodies his own famous performance as Tamburlaine. Actors performed changes of identity by altering their gait, voice, or accent and by donning or doffing such prosthetic additions as cloaks, masks, beards, patches, and hoods. Since many of these changes had to be performed quickly—sometimes offstage, sometimes in full view of the audience—the more handily detachable...

Feeling Intellect in Aurora Leigh and The Prelude

Close readings of Aurora Leigh (1856) and The Prelude (1850) reveal parallel passages that demonstrate Elizabeth Barrett Browning's clear revision of William Wordsworth's autobiographical work. These central passages allow a new understanding of the poets' respective poetic visions. Aurora's poetic development illuminates the intra subjective love central to Wordsworth's poetic vision and to Barrett Browning's own reading of Wordsworth. Through ironic dramatization, Barrett Browning engages Wordsworth's dialectic of vision by the "bodily eye" and the "intellectual eye" and rejuvenates and expands Wordsworth's revolutionary inter subjective poetic practice. Barrett Browning's alter-ego Aurora is able to intersubjectively embrace the urban "punctual presence," Wordsworth's blind Beggar.

The Mystery Play in Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province (review)

Reviewed by: The Mystery Play in Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province Éric Le Calvez Rogers, Peter . The Mystery Play in Madame Bovary: Mœurs de province. New York: Rodopi, Chiasma, 26, 2009. Pp. 193. ISBN 978-90-420-2706-0 In his study, Peter Rogers intends to show that there is a mystère, a liturgical drama (or mystery play) in Madame Bovary through Flaubert's use of religious tales, topoi, objects, discourses and imagery. The religious traditions, restaged in the novel, would display "a bond between theatre and religion in Flaubert's provinces" (back cover) beyond the obvious importance of religion in the narrative, which, because of the way it was represented, sent Flaubert to trial (among other problems from the prosecution's standpoint). Mystery plays are indeed mentioned by Homais in the novel, in a dialogue with the pastor Bournisien: "on représentait au milieu du choeur des espèces de farces, appelées mystères, dans lesquelles les lois de la décence souvent se trouvaient offensées" and Flaubert had already written, but not published, a "vieux mystère" in one of his earlier works (Smar). After recalling that the writer knew the Bible extremely well (in a letter to Louise Colet, Flaubert declares that it was the only book he read, before falling asleep, for more than three years), Rogers intends to demonstrate that the Bible "is inscribed in the story of Madame Bovary as a mystery play" which "threads its way through the fabric of its narrative and punctuates it with spicy and piercing details that have also been salient points of salvation history according to the Catholic tradition" (27). In order to do so, he has divided his study into three parts of different length: the first (29-90) deals with the close links between Emma and the Virgin Mary, the second (91-145) continues to "trace how Flaubert uses significant aspects of the devotion to Notre-Dame" (28) and the last and shortest (147-184) examines images of the sacred and of evil; these three parts are followed by a selected bibliography (185-193). And indeed, throughout this study can be found numerous signs, sometimes hidden, sometimes more obvious, along with interesting comments on scenes, episodes or details, such as Emma's education at the convent (44-45) where religious comparisons associate her with the Virgin Mary, or the scene where she goes to see Bournisien for religious help (55-60). Also illuminating are the explanations on naming Berthe (68) [End Page 359] who was almost named Madeleine, on the agricultural fair (73-76), where Lheureux is called a "rempant," "the cajoling serpent of Eden" (74; we find Lheureux several times in the study because of his role as a tempter, see also 114-115) and where Rodolphe, in order to seduce Emma, "has recourse to messianic discourse from the New Testament" (76; see also, later, in the woods for the baisade, the language he uses when he talks to her: she is a "madone sur un piédestal" and appears "immaculée," 84). The name that Homais gives to his pharmacy, "capharnaüm," is the name of the place of Jesus' first miracles (96); in the scene of the apricots which is interpreted here as a temptation, Charles plays the role of Eve (106-107); the figure of the snake is an important one in the novel (116); three motifs are related to the Immaculate Conception and reappear in the narrative (120-127): the blue shawl, the moon and the diabolical snake, and after Emma's death (133-139) the snake reappears in the form of a musical instrument ("le serpent souffl ait à pleine poitrine") "as a metaphor for the evil spirit" (138). The comments on the clubfoot's operation and on the blind beggar are also inspiring (155-163), as well as those on Homais's final figure when winning the Legion of Honor: "Homais is not playing the role of Satan but rather that of Jesus: he has both cross and an infernal band" (168). Nevertheless, at other times the demonstration is no longer convincing, which is often the case with this type of interpretative reading that subjectively...

"Antiquity! thou wondrous charm": Lamb, Nostalgia and the Effable City

Lamb's self-deprecatory reflex has made him his own worst enemy. (1) His very appeal of humility risks the impression of inconsequence. The subtle irony to which the author is equally prone, by which Lamb achieves an obverse mode of self-promotion, can easily be missed. In 'Witches, and Other Night-Fears' (London Magazine, October 1821), Elia slyly affects to lament the of his dreams in comparison with the fantastic, poetic visions conjured by Coleridge and Lamb's fellow contributor to the London Magazine, Bryan Waller Procter, or Barry Cornwall: For the credit of my imagination, I am almost ashamed to say how tame and my dreams are grown. They are never romantic, seldom even rural. They are of architecture and buildings--cities abroad, which I have never seen and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome. Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon--their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight--a map-like distinctness of trace and a daylight vividness of vision, that was all bin being awake. I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells--my highest Alps, but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape, in any way whatever of Helvellyn. Methought I was in that country, but the mountains were gone. The poverty of my dreams mortifies me (387). Elia follows this with a comical anecdote about an anticlimactic dream of his own, which has served to convince him that his proper, apparently deferential place is in prosaic prose rather than poetry--the supposed medium of high, imaginative endeavour. Lamb here not only parodies the already famous conception of Kubla Khan as an archetypal moment of Romantic genius, but also satirises De Quincey's opium-eater. The first instalment of the opium-eater's Confessions appears in the same issue of the London Magazine as the Night-Fears essay, thus making the ultra-realistic, un-dreamlike dreams of cities that Elia describes all the more suggestive of parody. As an ostensible self-representation of inadequacy which functions to empower the relatively humble periodical essayist, therefore, Lamb advertises an alternative notion of the city to that of his peers. De Quincey uses Wordsworth's vision of an ethereal city in Book II of The Excursion to buttress his urban versioning, and his habit impels the opium-eater into a prototypical act of flanerie, restlessly roaming an enigmatical and labyrinthine London on Saturday nights, seeking a spiritual bond with the poor which the opium habit ensures can only ever be of a fleeting, transient nature. De Quincey's city is like the phantasmagorical and ineffable city of Wordsworth's Residence in in Book VII of the 1805 version of The Prelude, in which the admonitory figure of the blind beggar suggests to the poet the unknowableness of urban life, and the dehumanizing maelstrom of the fair represents blank confusion! and a type not false/Of what the mighty city is itself (11. 595-6: 292). Wordsworth's and De Quincey's are existentially troubling cities, where losing oneself (or indeed others, as with the opium-eater's failure to find again the prostitute Ann, who saves his life in Oxford Street) is a sublime rather than pleasurable experience. If Lamb's prose can familiarise foreign and exotic dues, then his home city, London, for all the connotations of power and sublimity, is still less likely to appear mysterious. And so it proves. Enfeebled with age and tending toward hypochondria, hence typically enclosed in domestic spaces rather than rambling the streets without, Elia nevertheless knows a consequently knowable London. The sociability of the Elia essays adds to this effect, populated as they are by amicable and familial, often recurring characters such as the South-Sea clerks, the old benchers, a laughing sweep, a know-it-all schoolmaster, Bridget and John Elia, G. …

BEGGARS OF LOVE

The Nobel laureate for Hebrew literature S. Y. Agnon (1888–1970) acknowledged Gustav Flaubert (1821–1880) as an inspiration for his fiction, a master perfectionist and totally dedicated to his art. The extent of Flaubert’s influence on Agnon is greater than previously realized by scholars. This article considers numerous parallels that have not been brought together before: in Agnon’s psychological realism and the pattern of relations between the sexes, notably in Sippur pashut (A Simple Story); the portrayal of small town life, its maddening pettiness and boredom; the clash of romance and reality; triangles and the passive subservience of the hero to dominant women; idealization and disillusionment; sickness and sadomasochism, latent homosexuality and incest; imagery of clay and wax, children and flowers, dogs and cannibals, to depict the hero’s inner world. Both writers repeatedly use the figure of the blind beggar to incarnate the hero’s sense of inferiority, his emotionally impoverished life, given meaning in art.

Face/Off: Some Speculations on Elizabethan Acting

Certain less "literary" plays provide an informative picture of the place of the performer in Early Modern drama. Works like John a Kent and John a Cumber and The Blind Beggar of Alexandria were both wildly popular and dependent on the appeal of a kind of virtuoso impersonation routine, which this essay compares to John Woo's 1997 thriller Face/Off . Just as that film's stars trade off of their established characteristics, it seems likely that Edward Alleyn parodied his own roles in Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus in the aforementioned plays. The image that emerges, of an Elizabethan theatre that exploited popular trends and actors' established reputations, is at once familiar to modern-day consumers and indicative of an area in desperate need of exploration, if we are to understand the material conditions of Early Modern performance outside of canonical texts.

The call of blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46-52)

The story of Blind Bartimaeus (Mk 10:46-52) displays some traits that are unusual in a synoptic healing miracle and it displays most of the features of a call story. The genesis of the narration may account for the combination of these two genres: the story about the calling of the blind beggar Bartimaeus has been expanded by that of the healing of the blind man, where Jesus focuses attention on his faith. Next, the crowd was introduced to highlight Bartimaeus’ faith. Finally, the pericope was adapted to fit into Mark’s Gospel. The main editorial contribution of the evangelist is his contextualizing of the scene at the end of the section 8:27-10:52, which deals with Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, to suffering and death. In this episode Jesus calls Bartimaeus to follow him on his way. Mark added significance to the story by contrasting Bartimaeus with other characters, especially Peter, James and John, the foremost three disciples. This contrast may imply some criticism of leadership in the Markan community.