“In the suburbs of your good pleasure” : les lieux de plaisir à Londres à la fin du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècles
Fiche du document
3 septembre 2018
- handle: 10670/1.jmi8oo
- isbn: 9782878542950
- eisbn: 9782878548594
https://www.openedition.org/12554 , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Résumé
In late 16th century England as in the drama of the period, the tavern appeared as a place of festivity, pleasure-seeking and conviviality, hence as some sort of garden of earthly delights. However, puritans and moralists denounced it as an inferno, synonymous with luxury, venereal diseases, lust, debt and blasphemy. They described it as a hellish place so as to frighten the regulars away but also to try and prevent more believers from frequenting such dens of vice where you could lose your money as well as your soul, given up to the devil. In the so-called true stories puritans narrate, the devil is used to scare the faithful, but also acts as a nemesis who performs God’s will. The recurrence of metamorphoses, into the devil or thanks to him, is there to be noticed. In the drama one can also notice that those who haunt taverns undergo sudden changes, distinguished by the motif of inversion, so that the tavern becomes in itself a kind of mundus inversus.