ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on "Crownings and Uncrowinings" and "Wisdom and the Fools," both of which demonstrate the confrontation and integration of the allegorical with the real, and of foolishness with wisdom. A pivotal event in the Book of Esther skillfully integrates aspects of carnival and wisdom. Yet, Godly Queene Hester is a play staged as entertainment, with a strong, carnivalesque dimension that resides in its use of parodic, subversive language. The Book of Esther is very much, in Alter's words, a "comic fantasy", one that very naturally invites its dramatic transformation into the allegorical and the carnivalesque. The acts of crowning and uncrowning are primarily focused in Godly Queene Hester on the characters of Hester and Aman; these acts are most appropriately juxtaposed in the play, to thereby be contrasted both morally and dramatically. Debate and discourse, and carnival and wisdom, are uniquely integrated in this morality play, providing a fascinating, timely dramatization of the Book of Esther.
