CÉLINDE

This play is described by its author as a heroic poem, though interestingly the large part of it is not written in verse. The plot is fairly bland; two couples whose love is derailed by well meaning parents. This leads to attempted murder and two faked deaths to end with a happy conclusion. As I've noted from several other plays in this period, this play takes many cues from Elizabethan drama with its misadventures and misdirections, but I'd like to focus on a dramatic device that was common in Elizabethan drama, but is also seen in Celinde, the play within a play. Typically the play within a play structure is a smaller scale illustration of what is happening in the play itself, in order for the characters to have a dialogue in a meta-narrative. In Celinde however, the play performed in the third act is a dramatization of the life of Judith, which is interrupted by the attempted murder of Floridan. I found this puzzling because the two stories seem to lack a common theme. Judith uses deception and her sexuality to infiltrate the enemy and save her people, while Celinde is driven to murder from the desperation of her situation in a marriage that she wants to avoid. It should be noted that Floridan is not the one pressuring her into this marriage, but instead her father. I have no answer as to the relation between the play within a play and the larger plot of Celinde, but it is nonetheless interesting to consider the reasons for its inclusion.