After leaving home with his inheritance, the prodigal arrives
at the town square and encounters seven “boon companions” who say they will
accompany him wherever he goes, promise to love him, and guarantee that he will
always have his “every pleasure.” The key transition in this part of the play
is from the emphasis on the son’s comfortable life at home with a loving family
to the fact that the son wants to experience “every pleasure.” The audience now
discovers that the prodigal’s new companions are the seven deadly sins—pride,
avarice, envy, wrath, sloth, gluttony, and lust—and the characters who
represent those sins each get to introduce themselves and their “circumstances”
to the prodigal and the audience.
“Pride” is the leader of the seven men, but he allows each
one to introduce himself. Avarice, for example, says:
My name is Avarice, and I can think
Of nothing but increasing what I
own;
I value neither friendship nor my
kin,
As long as I can gather many goods.
This is my goodness, this my every
joy;
To prosper more, I’d even hurt
myself;
I never have enough for future
need;
In gathering goods, I disregard my
life.
It is clear that the prodigal has already succumbed, to a
certain extent, to many of these seven mortal sins. Ironically, he also is prophetically warned about
his forthcoming downfall not only by his father, brother, and the servant who
counted out his ducats, but also by one of his new “boon companions,” Gluttony:
I know how to make famine out of
wealth,
Know how to turn great riches into
nought,
And of great poverty I am the
cause—
Now my condition you have
understood.
Obviously, the prodigal does not yet truly understand,
although he soon will.
The incorporation of the seven deadly sins in the play is
paralleled in many texts of this era that connect the Prodigal Son parable to
the seven deadly sins (e.g., Chaucer’s The
Parsons Tale).
The younger son leaves the stage with the seven deadly sins
after they each give a speech, so at this point Pulci’s play does not dwell on
the prodigal’s debauchery—the audience does not see it directly. Instead the
play transitions to a dialogue between the father and the elder son, in which
they declare their love and devotion for each other, and the elder son promises
to stay obedient to his father.
Next up: The younger son returns home.
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