Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison (eds). <i>Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre</i>. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. Pp 220.

Abstract

Any scholar with an interest in blazon will have encountered Nancy Vickers’s writing on the use of blazons by Petrarch’s early modern successors. For some thirty years, Vickers’s essays have been central to the discussion of the gendered power dynamics of blazons as poetic devices which enable the determining male gaze to control the female body through verbally dismembering it.1 In Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theatre editors Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison seek to build on Vickers’s foundational work, and they also acknowledge their indebtedness to Jonathan Sawday and Lynn Enterline. Their aim is to fill the lacunae that these scholars leave when they focus their attention on the blazon as a lyric rather than theatrical device. ‘The dramatic potential of the blazon’, write Uman and Morrison, ‘has not yet been considered in a sustained and comprehensive manner’ (6). While the stated goal of this collection of essays is to make the stage and performance central to understanding blazon, a secondary aim in the essays is to reconsider the gender dynamics of this kind of writing, making the case that on the early modern English stage it is not always true that a blasonneur is male and his objectified subject is female. Several essays in the collection draw on new approaches to source material in order to make the staging and performance of blazon central. Lisa S. StarksEstes’s essay, for instance, rethinks the often-discussed staging of Lavinia’s mutilated body by considering Shakespeare’s appropriation of Ovidian imagery. Starks-Estes reminds readers that an ‘obvious source of erotic visual imagery in this play’ (60) is Ovide Imagise; the widely circulated illustrations of scenes from the Metamorphoses which accompanied both Latin and translated versions of the text. Shakespeare’s grotesque image of Lavinia standing on stage in tableau while her uncle blazons her mutilated body allows Shakespeare to use Lavinia’s body as a living illustration, and to associate Lavinia not only with Philomela but as a kind of amalgam of Ovidian figures. Other contributors to the book choose to make theatre central to their discussion by focusing on particular productions, rather than the idea of performance as a whole. Thomas P. Anderson, for instance, argues that Julie Taymor’s film