Religion Flashcards
Quotes and critics
‘Hypocrisy seems to be the only or at least a cardinal sin in Orton’s cosmos’
Joan Dean
Hal: You never had the blessing of a rape. I was with him at his only ravishment […] Broke a tooth in the struggle, she did. It was legal with you. While Jesus pointed to his Sacred Heart, you pointed to yours.
Fay: I never point. It’s rude.
Fay had sex with Dennis. Furthermore, it was under a holy picture of the Sacred Heart.
Orton mocks the Catholic Church and takes aim at organised religion/religious authority because just like the government, it presumes how people should live.
Fay: The Ten Commandments. She was a great believer in some of them.
Orton here is criticising members of organised faith who still do immoral things.
Orton satirises Catholic teachings.
McLeavy: Harold would never do a thing like that. He belongs to the Sons of Divine Providence
Religion as an excuse for wrongdoing as if religion exempts itself from evil.
If God has shaped this ‘son’ who is immoral, money-centric and a homosexual, it is ironic since these are all values which the Church professes itself against. Mockery of Catholic Church by Orton
Fay: “I’m doing God’s work”
[…]
She lifts her rosary and bows her head in prayer
Fay uses religion as a cover for her unethical behaviour.
She wants to keep up appearances that she is praying and grieving despite her evident moral failings.
All of this suggests a complicity between crimes and religious institutions.
‘the play is permeated by a kind of grotesque humour […] from details of imagery to whole scenes like the stabbing of a dead body.
Ekeblad
Vindice: “Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love,
My study’s ornament, thou shell of death, Once the bright face of my betrothed lady,
Vindice turns the skull of his murdered fiancée into a grotesque religious relic.
Like Orton, Middleton describing the use of ‘study’s ornament’ mirrors the display of saints’ relics, perhaps mocking the sanctity typically associated with such objects.
This subversion of religious imagery critiques how sanctity is often used to mask darker human impulses.
Vindice: “When the bad bleed, then is the tragedy good.”
Vindice justifies his pursuit of revenge by framing it as moral retribution.
The phrase suggests that divine justice aligns with his vendetta.
Ironically, Vindice’s actions are driven by hatred rather than true virtuousness and righteousness.
