Showing papers in "Shakespeare Quarterly in 1998"

“Mulattos,” “Blacks,” and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference

Abstract: ITHINK THIS PLAY IS RACIST, AND I THINK IT IS NOT":1 Virginia Vaughan's perplexed response to Othello is symptomatic of the problems faced by late-twentieth-century critics in approaching the racial dimension of Shakespeare's play. For if the work of recent scholars has taught us anything about early modern constructions of human difference, it is that any attempt to read back into the early modern period an idea of "race" based on post-Enlightenment taxonomy is doomed to failure.2 To talk about race in Othello is to fall into anachronism; yet not to talk about it is to ignore something fundamental about a play that has rightly come to be identified as a foundational text in the emergence of modern European racial consciousness-a play that trades in constructions of human difference at once misleadingly like and confusingly unlike those twentieth-century notions to which they are nevertheless recognizably ancestral. In the latter part of this paper, I hope to cast some light on Shakespeare's treatment of what came to be called "race" by exploring an experience of alterity in the East Indian archipelago, a theater of colonial encounter which may at first seem far away from the Mediterranean world of Othello. But I should like to frame that discussion by briefly considering some of the ways in which this tragedy perplexes the notions of ethnic and national identity that its subtitle so casually invokes. In an essay that provides a useful corrective to anachronistically postcolonial understandings of race in Othello, Emily Bartels has stressed the ideological openness of the play's treatment of human difference, arguing that (except in the eyes of Iago and those he manipulates) "Othello is, as the subtitle announces, 'the Moor of Venice' ... neither an alienated nor an assimilated subject, but a figure defined by two worlds, a figure (like Marlowe's Jew of Malta) whose ethnicity occupies one slot, professional interests another, compatibly"-the fortunate possessor, then, of "a dual, rather than divided, identity."3 But the invocation of

Male Pregnancy and Cognitive Permeability in Measure for Measure

Abstract: M/EASURE FOR MEASURE WAS AN EARLY FAVORITE OF new-historicist critics; and no wonder, since it clearly treats changing technologies of power, especially the appropriation by the state and stage of internalized methods of control that had previously been the property of other institutions, most notably the Catholic Church. Steven Mullaney describes the play as "a searching exploration of the shape a more intrusive form of power might take," a form of power which he calls "apprehension" and which Steven Greenblatt calls "anxiety."1 All agree: the play is about the power of ruling ideologies to shape early modern subjects, and the unruliness of those subjects is to be interpreted for the most part as a self-justifying construction of power. In Jonathan Dollimore's words, "we can indeed discern in the demonising of sexuality a relegitimation of authority."2 In these readings the unruly materiality of the subject itself is to some extent shortchanged; what seems important are external cultural interpretations of the body and bodily behavior.3 Indeed, both psychoanalytic and new-historicist readings have seen the process of subjectification represented in the play as involving a kind of disembodiment; Janet Adelman, for example, argues that "the last scene is constructed to make invisible male power, rather than the visibly pregnant female body, the site of revelation," so that, "in the end, the replacement of the bodily female by the spiritual male dispensation seems complete."4 Ac-

Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification

Abstract: Shakespeare was neither a Royalist defender of order and hierarchy nor a consistently radical champion of social equality, but rather simultaneously radical and conservative as a critic of emerging forms of modernity. Hugh Grady argues that Shakespeare's social criticism in fact often parallels that of critics of modernity from our own Postmodernist era, that the broad analysis of modernity produced by Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault, and others can serve as a productive enabling representation and critique of the emerging modernity represented by the image in Troilus and Cressida of 'an universal wolf' of appetite, power, and will. The readings of Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, and As You Like It in Shakespeare's Universal Wolf demonstrate Shakespeare's keen interest in what twentieth-century theory has called 'reification' - a term which designates social systems created by human societies but which confronts those societies as operating beyond human control, according to an autonomous 'systems' logic - in nascent mercantile capitalism, in power-oriented Machiavellian politics, and in the scientistic, value-free rationality which Horkheimer and Adorno call 'instrumental reason'.

Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England

Abstract: OHN HOSKINS, IN THE EPIGRAPH ABOVE, MAKES A DIRECT LINK between mental stability and rhetorical mastery: production of eloquent utterances is the natural effect of a sound mind. Hoskins's statement foregrounds the importance of language and rhetorical eloquence as linked analytical categories in the construction of the healthy early modern English subject. Written for young men making their way in public life, his Directions also affords a suggestive intertextual gloss on Othello's hysterical collapse in 4.1: "Lie with her? Lie on her? We say lie on her when they belie her. Lie with her! Zounds, that's fulsome!" (11. 35-36).2 Here indeed Othello's "words do jar," his "sentences are preposterous," and his "utterance breaks itself into fragments and uncertainties," rendering him the uneloquent man, a mere shadow of the homo rhetoricus and military public servant of the senate scene (1.3). Othello's debased prose, the strained play of the punning rhetorical figures polyptoton and antanaclasis, is a deluded expression of betrayal, whose effects Iago names tellingly a "savage madness" (4.1.53). By positing a further relationship between cultural incivility and linguistic barbarity, signified in the xenophobically charged term savage, Iago gives Hoskins's psycholinguistic presumption a decidedly racial turn. It is Iago who, at the close of the senate scene, delivers the damning sobriquet "an erring barbarian" (1.3.343), "erring" itself being a punning reference to Othello's geographic wandering and his propensity to make mistakes, to wander out of the proper limits. But what exactly are these errors made by Othello, and what limits has he transgressed? Or, in what fuller sense is he a barbarian wanderer? Barbarian and savage are two terms that coincide-one might even say equate-naturally in Iago's stratigraphic mind, designating Othello as cultural alien.3 The third notion"lacking rhetorical eloquence"-coincides as well, so that linguistic and cul-

The taming of the shrew : texts and contexts

Abstract: Introduction - The Text of The Taming of the Shrew, edited by David Bevington - Contexts: -Alternative Endings - What is a Ballad? What-is a Shrew? - The Marital Deal, and its Contradictions - The 'Femme Covert': Married Women's Legal Status - Women's Work: Gender and the Division of Labour - Authority and Violence in the Household: Wife-Beating - Analogues to Wife-Taming - Authority and Violence in the Household: Servant-Beating - Popular, Humorous Treatments of Domestic Violence: Shrew Taming and Untamed Shrews

Shakespeare's Italy : functions of Italian locations in Renaissance drama

Abstract: Part 1 Images and culture: Shakespeare's Italians, Harry Levin Italy staged in English Renaissance drama, A.J. Hoenselaars Italian vices - cross-cultural constructions of temptation and desire in English renaissance drama, Andreas Mahler the fictional world of "Romeo and Juliet" - cultural connotations of an Italian setting, Angela Locatelli. Part 2 Themes and tradition: history and myth in "The Merchant of Venice", Ronnie Mulryne duelling in the Italian manner - the case of Romeo and Juliet, Sergio Rossi merchants and madcaps - Dekker's "Honest Whore" plays and the "Commedia dell'arte", Viviana Comensoli. Part 3 Venice spectacle - the Veneto, metatheatre, and Shakespeare, Agostino Lombardo streets, squares, and courts - Venice as a stage in shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Roberta Mullini the idea of Venice in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, Leo Salingar Dobbin on the rialto - Venice and the division of identity, Avraham Oz. Part 4 Language and ideology: "Of that fatal country" - Sicily and the rhetoric of topography in "The Winter's Tale", Michele Marrapodi the rhetoric of poison in John Webster's Italianate plays, Mariangela Tempera "The soil alters Y'are in another country" - multiple perspectives and political resonances in "Women Beware Women", Zara Bruzzi and A.A. Bromham "Under the Dent of the English Pen" - the language of Italy in English renaissance drama, A.J. Hoenselaars.

"Infinite Space": Representation and Reformation in Measure for Measure

Abstract: ATEASURE FOR MEASURE IS A DEEPLY DISSATISFYING COMEDY, SO problematic 1Vlthat, as Jean Howard argues, it "puts critics under stress."1 They typically respond by judging, finding fault with the play's structure, the Duke's elaborate manipulations, Isabella's ethical choices, Shakespeare's use of the bed-trick, and, especially, the final trial scene, with its exaggerated theatricality, its failure to effect any real reformation, and its unsettling subversion of the conventional comic ending.2 Identifying a pattern of failed, inadequate, and problematic substitutions in Measurefor Measure, Alexander Leggatt, like many other critics, concludes that the play is flawed:

George Buc, William Shakespeare, and the Folger George a Greene

Abstract: THE ANONYMOUS PLAY George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield was entered in the Stationers' Register on 1 April 1595 by Cuthbert Burby. In 1599 it was printed by Burby in quarto under a typically complex title: A Pleasant Conceyted Comedie of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield. As it was sundry times acted by the seruants of the right Honourable the Earle of Sussex.' Inscriptions on the title page of the copy now held by the Folger Shakespeare Library (Fig. 1) reveal that an early owner had sought to identify the author:

Reading and writing in Shakespeare

Abstract: These essays range from typography to theology, from epistemology to ethics, from class to culture, from gender to genre, from letters to literature. The y end by confronting the connections between writing. printing, reading, interpretation, and authorship.

What's the Globe Good For?

Abstract: I saw two plays at the Globe last summer. I'd done a little work for the in-house magazine, and as my reward, I was given two house seats to whatever was on for the brief period of my stay in London. It turned out to be The Maid's Tragedy and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. For both productions the seats were in the second row of the lowest gallery, about two thirds of the way around the circle-eight o'clock on a watch dial. My guest and I rented cushions, for ?1 each, to mitigate the authenticity of the wooden benches, reminding ourselves that cushions were authentic, too; in fact they felt a little too authentic. The cramped legroom was more ominous; had we been an authentic five feet tall, like the putative Globe playgoer, perhaps we wouldn't have minded. I've spent forty years explaining to students that it didn't matter where you sat in a theater like the Globe; it was basically an auditorium, where what mattered was the acoustics. Sitting in the center was no better than sitting on the sides because on a thrust (rather than proscenium) stage, the actors wouldn't have played only to the center. I will now stop saying this; it is an egregious error, as is the implied assumption that acoustics aren't a problem in such a theater. From our vantage point, the pillar, as we could see even before the play began, was a problem. I should emphasize that our seats were not said to have impeded views, and if we had bought our tickets, we would have been charged full price for them-?22 each. In fact the actors in the 1996 performances at the Globe, Peter Hall's troupe from the Old Vic, had complained particularly about the pillars, even to the point of insisting they couldn't have been authentic. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates, however, that the pillars are historically correct: it is the actors who are not authentic. At The Maid's Tragedy, we saw a huge mess of scenery, largely hidden behind the column; three quarters of the back facade covered with a very baggy black cloth; and, in the middle of the groundlings' space, a throne on a dais. Richard Proudfoot, praising this set, observed that it is a perfect reconstruction of a court-masque set. So it is, and that is exactly what's wrong with it: it is the set for a production in the Whitehall Banqueting House, requiring a proscenium stage and an audience located in front. Such a set has nothing whatever to do with an open, three-sided stage such as the Globe's. For us and about half the audience, all the action of the masque was hidden behind the pillars. What the people sitting in the center saw was quite stylish, though even here the black cloth still looked perfunctory and makeshift, a clear index to how badly this production wanted to be somewhere else. In fact The Maid's Tragedy did nothing whatever to take the special qualities of the theater into account. Most of the action was played halfway back, as it would have been on a proscenium stage, rendering it invisible to much of the audience. The performers of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, on the contrary, did their best to work with the house and even had quite a lot of fun with it. All entrances were made around the outside of the pillars; most of the action was played as far downstage as possible; and there was a good deal of use made of the pillars and of the architecture of the Globe generally-leaning on the columns, climbing up to the roof, emphatically not ignoring the building. For this theater A Chaste Maid was a much better show. But in both productions acoustics

Shakespeare at Work

Abstract: It is now accepted that Shakespeare revised many of his most celebrated plays. But how were the great tragedies altered and with what effects? John Jones looks at the implications of Shakespeare's revisions for the reader and spectator alike and shows the playwright getting to grips with the problems of characterization and scene formation in such plays as Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida. In characteristically lucid and accessible prose, John Jones assesses recent textual scholarship on Shakespeare's revisions and illuminates the artistic impact of the revised texts and their importance for our understanding of each play's moral and metaphysical foundations. Shakespeare at Work brings together English literature's greatest writer and one of its most distinguished critics. the result is a book that will be essential and entertaining reading for scholars, students, and Shakespeare enthusiasts alike.

Fearful Simile: Stealing the Breech in Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays

Abstract: CRITICALLY SPEAKING, SHAKESPEARE'S HENRY VI PLAYS ARE ALWAYS going to pieces. If the project of carving up these plays and giving only the best parts to Shakespeare has passed out of fashion, it has been replaced by various discussions of the plays as self-fragmenting-artifacts mirroring the disrupted state they describe. In this sense the logic of the plays might best be described in terms of repetition rather than linear progress: heroic flourishes, treacherous acts, the crowning, capturing, and killing of kings recur as patterns that all but eclipse the individuals concerned.2 And the female characters of these plays, like the men and the battles and the vicissitudes of kingship, might be less distinct than they are variations on a theme:3 Margaret is led onstage as Joan is dragged off; Joan's witchcraft anticipates that of the Countess; sexual excess is suspected about the virgin, suggested about the Countess, known about the queen; the woman warrior is reduced to ashes at the end of Part 1 only to reappear as the "Captain Margaret" of Part 3. Yet the progress in the second Henriad toward a centralized image of power is not absent from these earlier plays, although it is differently gendered and certainly far different in its effects; images of female transgression come ever closer to home and, when they are inside, look rather different than they did when they were outside. As Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin observe in Engendering a Nation, "The French women who threaten to subvert the English historical project in Part I are unmarried; in Part II, the dangers they embody quite literally come home to

The Doubled Jaques and Constructions of Negation in As You Like It

Abstract: S THOROUGHLY DOES SHAKESPEARE'S WORK encompass our sense of textual possibility that even his apparent missteps take on interest and meaning. The Fool's unexplained disappearance from King Lear, for instance, has famously come to serve as an emblem of Shakespeare's writerly economy-a character disappears when no further use exists for him-and has been formally linked with the king's own descent into a Foolish view of things.1 Yet, as psychoanalysis tells us, the structure of language itself has a capacity to open up crevices in a surface of meaning, to trick a wily practitioner into showing a hand he may not realize he holds, so that "mistakes" may serve as pathways to recesses within the text. Jacques Derrida has alerted us to the paradoxical way that a "trace" or "track in the text" both testifies to authorial presence and erases the writer's authority as point of origin.2 The particular "misstep" here begins with an issue most teachers of As You Like It have faced: the inclusion of two characters named Jaques in the dramatis personae. It is not entirely accurate to say that the two are "in the play," since only one, the melancholyJaques who serves Duke Senior, is addressed by name in the course of the action. The other, Orlando and Oliver's brotherJaques de Boys, is identified in the Folio text as "Second Brother" when he appears in the closing moments of Act 5. But because Orlando has referred to "my brother Jaques" (1.1.5) in the opening speech, Jaques de Boys exists as a palpable source of confusion for readers and viewers, haunting the play as a kind of double for the melancholyJaques.3 Or, as I will argue, it is more precisely the melancholyJaques who serves as a double, standing in for the absent second son of Sir Rowland de Boys. In a play so intimately concerned with names and with substitutions, this elliptical blocking of an absentJaques with a present one provides a signal instance of the symbol's capacity to compensate for loss. ButJaques is not just any symbol, nor does he have just a garden variety of uncanny textual effect. Rather, the requirement of a melancholyJaques, so crucial to the play's emotional equilibrium, testifies to an undertow of sadness in it that is brilliantly held at bay by a

Shakespeare and Lancaster

Abstract: LANCASTER RESONATES THROUGH BOTH THE FIRST AND SECOND tetralogies of Shakespeare's English history plays. As the name of one of the two royal houses that contested the throne from the deposition of Richard II (1399) to the defeat of Richard III by Henry Tudor at Bosworth Field (1485), including "Yorke, and Lancasters long iarres," it could hardly do otherwise.2 Yet the precise resonance of "Lancaster," what associations it might have had two centuries after the beginning of that historical sequence for Shakespeare's contemporaries generally and Shakespeare personally, has not been examined in detail. The possibility that Shakespeare spent some of his early "lost years" in Lancashire (the county of which Lancaster is county town) is a starting-point for this study, though it is not my theme. "Lancaster" has a national significance, not merely a local one, and in that respect its status in the history plays reveals nothing unequivocally biographical. But, as we shall see, an investigation of "Lancaster" and its resonances does associate Shakespeare with Roman Catholicism, however indirectly; if the future playwright is the "William Shakeshafte" mentioned in the 1581 will of the recusant Alex-

Eight tragedies of Shakespeare : a marxist study

Abstract: The seventeenth century saw the brief flowering of tragic drama in western Europe as a whole and in England in particular. It was, argues Victor Kiernan, the artistic expression of the consciousness of change which permeated every aspect of life during this period. In this companion volume to Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen Kiernan sets out to rescue Shakespearean studies from the increasingly solipsistic terrain of literary criticism, focusing instead on historical location as a means to understanding Shakespeare's writing. Kiernan contends that the deep and accelerating changes in economy and society, brought about by the development of modern capitalism, drew the underlying tragic tensions of the History plays to the forefront. Other writers were feeling similar influences and across Western Europe, especially in France and Spain, tragic drama became a popular form. Kiernan shows how England's supremacy in this genre was both a mirror and a result of the profound nature of its social and economic development and the uncertainty and anxiety which it created. Opening with a sketch of the progress of the theatre, Kiernan goes on to provide a portrait of Shakespeare as a professional. He then considers each of the eight tragedies from Julius Caesar to Coriolanus, drawing out their contrasts and recurring themes. In a final section he analyses the group as a whole and explores attitudes to the monarchy, political life, war, religion and philosophy and the relationship between the sexes.

The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing@@@Hamlet and Narcissus

Abstract: Introduction. 1. A writer reading: the theories of a 'Sinner With a Melancholic Humor' 2. Armida's lap, Erminia's tears: in the wake of paternity and figuration in the Gerusalemme liberata. 3. The mirror and the snake: the case of Marvell's 'unfortunate Lover' 4. Errors and dam('n)d confusions: Shakespearian subjects on trial 5. 'Hairy on the In-side:' The Duchess of Malfi and the body of Lycanthropy