English Coursework – First question.
Alfieri’s speech at the beginning begins by introducing a lot of concepts which are explored upon later in the play. He begins with a speech on lawyers and the distrust that originates from it, “You see how uneasily they nod to me? That’s because I am a lawyer… a lawyer means the law, and in Sicily … the law has not been a friendly idea”. We can see later in the play that both Eddie and Marcus turn to the law for help, but the law lets them down, “You mean to tell me that there’s no law that a guy which he ain’t right can go to work and marry a girl and - ?”. These two parts of the play link to show us that the law will often clash with loyalty, and when something interferes with loyalty, one often has to turn to the law for help; however, the law may often deal with the problems too severely. We can see this by the drastic action that Eddie has to take to remove Rodolpho from the scene.
However, the idea of justice is introduced. It is possible to deduce that the law governing Italy is not the law that is written as we can see from what Alfieri says about justice – “Justice is very important here” and what Marco says about the law, “All the law is not in a book”, later in the play. This may be suggesting through authorial intention that something greater governed Italy than the written law, which controlled justice in its own right. We can see throughout the play what this other law may be: loyalty. One of the first major mentions of a sense of loyalty begins with Eddie, “And they spit on him in the street, his own father and his brothers”. This suggests that the law is secondary to loyalty within a family, and if the law is acted upon when there is a problem in a family, the loyalty is broken and the one who broke it is punished in another way. This is a premonition of what happens to Eddie later on. Eddie speaks his own fate in this small anecdote, “He was crazy after, I tell you that, boy.” At the end of the play, after Eddie has broken his loyalty, we see him grow crazier as Beatrice confirms, “He’s crazy now, you know the way they get, what good is it!” and we see in the stage directions, “He is incensing himself and little bits of laughter even escape him as his eyes are murderous”. This completes the anecdote, and suggests that the play was futile from the beginning and an inevitable turn of events towards the end of the play, making the play a tragedy. This is reinforced by Alfieri’s beginning speech, in which he says, “… heard the same complaint and sat there as powerless as I, and watched it run its bloody course.” This also shows Alfieri’s futile attempts to help the situation and the inevitable “bloody course” towards the ending.
