Carnival Plays: It’s good to be bad?

                A recurring theme I have been seeing in these plays is cunning characters getting away with manipulating facts and other characters and basically bad behavior being rewarded in general.

                Be it arguing because they did not get their way, stealing food, or infidelity, the protagonists in these plays are not good. There seems to be an overwhelming theme of rewarding moral deviance. In The Nose Dance, the characters are very proud of their large, gnarly, warted noses (something that people today would be very embarrassed about). In this regard, they are very proud and boastful, things that we are usually encouraged against. Then, once the winner is announced, this group of fully grown men throw a temper tantrum. A fight breaks out over whether the rules should be changed because the majority were unhappy with the decision. Instead of being happy that they were even considered (or even giving the mayor a chance to announce the runners up), they turn an otherwise happy event sour.

                In stories like The Stolen Bacon, The Wife in the Well, and The Farmer with the Blur, the guilty party manages to make their victims look like the guilty party. Not that the victims were innocents (stingy, drunk, and abusive to say the least), but for the crimes that take place in the plays, they are wrongly blamed… or just tricked entirely.

                I realize that these are all plays meant to poke fun at society (corrupted priests and marriages, anyone), but it seems odd to present them like this. Rarely have I seen this level of amorality presented in such a light-hearted way. While reading, I could definitely imagine the actors working the crowd and swaying them to cheer on these characters, and I think that’s what threw me off the most with it. Usually, when it comes to morality in plays, the characters are encouraged to be the best they can be, and this seemed to throw all of that out the window. I wouldn’t say that these characters are more real than the ones in the morality plays I’ve read in the past, though. I think people as a whole are neither as pious as they are in the morality plays nor as corrupt as they are in these.

-Andrea