Fun But Odd

George Peele - The Old Wive's Tale: 'For your further entertainment, it shall be as it may be, so and so'' by George Peele
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first half of this is pretty entertaining. With a play-within-a-play structure, you have an old woman telling the story, sitting off to one side with two men listening, while it's enacted on the stage. There's something charming about this, and it feels like modern drama made for kids. It's much easier to understand than a lot of drama from that era, which makes it more fun to read, but it kinda falls apart (IMO) in the second half.

The action gets sorta messy and only gets worked out via some ghostly deus ex machina. The plot is meaningless; nobody's effort has any discernible impact on the outcome. Some women find husbands basically by accident, or the working of fate; they didn't do anything to make it happen. Several characters go up against the villain, an ancient sorcerer, and get defeated easily, with zero drama. The hero, though, defeats the sorcerer, but only with the unexpected help of a ghost. Yes, he helped bury the man whose ghost then wants to repay him, but that's his only contribution to his success. Without supernatural help, he would have failed, too.

So, there is no plot. Not really. There are conflicts, but no meaningful striving to overcome them. Stuff happens. Winners win and losers lose, with all of it wired by the author. Compared to other plays of the time and since, the plot feels rudimentary and filled with dramatic cheating, without the hero winning through his own efforts. In effect, it's a pageant, a spectacle, and that's fine. I bet it was fun to watch.

So, three stars seems about right. Pretty fun, but not structured in the way we've come to expect in such stories.

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