Early Modern Audiences Research Articles

‘Mankind Dame’: John Studley’s early modern Clytemnestra

Abstract John Studley’s Agamemnon (1566) explores women’s rule and how it can combine feminine and masculine elements to achieve and maintain political power. To do so, Studley employs the character of Clytemnestra, who simultaneously retains elements of her previous dramatic versions and is shaped to resonate with early modern English audiences. This process is twofold, taking into consideration linguistic and character traits. Clytemnestra’s language is expanded from the Latin through masculine-coded tropes characteristic of vernacular lyric. Moreover, she possesses traits traditionally considered masculine (martial courage, determination, bold speech and skill in weaponry). In Studley’s Clytemnestra, then, endurance and action combined create a gender hybridity in speech and behaviour. In turn, her portrayal resonates with discourses surrounding early modern women rulers, from Elizabeth Tudor to Mary Stuart. Ultimately, Agamemnon reshapes the treacherous queen of Mycenae to function as a commentary on how a woman in power could appear, speak and behave.

All’s Well That Ends Well’s Paroles and the Bisexual Miles Gloriosus: Early Modern Expectations, Modern Stagings

ABSTRACT Productions of All’s Well That Ends Well increasingly portray Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer. This article argues that such stagings are not unjustified in that early modern audiences would expect to associate Paroles with same-sex attraction. While it is a critical commonplace that Paroles displays the traits of the classical miles gloriosus or braggart soldier, modern discussions of early modern braggart soldiers omit one trait of the classical version: an open, shame-free bisexuality. This article argues that an awareness of the classical miles gloriosus’ bisexuality established expectations and reception frameworks in early modern audiences when they encountered early modern dramatic braggart soldiers, including Paroles. It then demonstrates textual traces of this. However, if staging Paroles as gay, bisexual or queer today might be justified in terms of this reception history, the ways in which this is done are not always as progressive as they might seem. This is particularly so when evidence of same-sex attraction no longer serves primarily as pleasurable corroboration that Paroles is a miles gloriosus, but instead is framed as a psychological-realist problem, a source of shame to be overcome, and when Paroles’ humiliation scene is staged as sexualised homophobic violence not grounded in the text.

Harmonious Relationships: Sounds and Stones in Ottoman Architecture in the Making

Architectural narratives on building processes are admittedly rare in premodern histories. Accounts of visitors who observed and reacted to architecture in the making are even more exceptional. Moreover early modern audiences’ perceptions of music and architecture have been rarely explored in relation to building processes and synesthetic experiences. This article presents a critical reading of Caʿfer Efendi’s Risāle-i Miʿmāriyye [Book on Architecture] of 1614 by focusing on its chapter on the Sultan Ahmed mosque (1609–17) in Istanbul. Caʿfer associates sounds in the construction site with Sufi musical practices and the science of music. A conversation with a Sufi at the site reveals how twelve types of marbles, four types of strikes, and seven types of foremen were associated with Ottoman music theory. The article also explores how the shared geometrical foundations of architectural tools and musical instruments were linked to harmonious sounds and forms. This union of spatial, visual, and aural experiences of the mosque in the making produced various forms of knowledge for the visitors. Architecture’s mediating role for sensuous, spiritual, and scientific knowledge further illuminates the relation between theory and practice in Ottoman architecture.

Suspending Disbelief: (Un)civil Conflict in Ginés Pérez de Hita's Guerras civiles de Granada (primera parte)

To overcome continual disputes over Ginés Pérez de Hita's unknowable intentions, this article adopts the complicated and conflicted perspective of his broad readership in early modern Spain. This point of view understood Guerras civiles de Granada I through a horizon of expectations established by practices perceived in verisimilar historias (histories/stories) and theories gleaned from prescriptive works. To better understand these expectations, the first half of this article examines how apocryphal and authentic historias reveal frictions between early modern conceptions of the epic and historiography with respect to facticity and verisimilitude. The second half of this article considers how Guerras civiles de Granada I's entertaining verisimilitude enabled an early modern audience to suspend disbelief and contemplate how intolerant malsines perpetuated cycles of (un)civil conflict in early modern Spain by falsely accusing others of betraying the kingdom's customs, religion, and royal family.

An Early Modern Audience in the Classroom: Metatheater, Religion, Race

Abstract: Emphasizing the role of audiences in shaping the meaning and social function of performance, this essay presents some suggestions for deepening the discussion of race in our undergraduate classes on "Golden Age" theater. These suggestions include enticing students with recognizable names and accessible texts—Cervantes's El retablo de las maravillas is one of my choices—and then nudging them to consider canonical works in dialogue both with representations of Black characters and with the diasporic experience of free and enslaved Black people in Spain during the early modern period. We should encourage class discussion that draws early modern primary sources into the racial politics of the present. We should likewise investigate and historicize the relationship between religion and race as conceptual categories. These sorts of pedagogical adjustments are part of the effort to rethink the methodological presuppositions and canons that have long defined—and constrained—early modern Iberian studies.

Pity and Piety in Titus Andronicus

This article argues that William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus dramatizes the potential ambivalence of pity in rhetorical situations when images and objects that evoke pity not only constitute evidence of genuine suffering but can also facilitate motives of fraud, cruelty, and revenge. The play is organized around six appeals to pity that identify the emotion not only as a key element in the dramatic and rhetorical contexts of the play's aesthetic of blood but also as an emotion that is tied closely to its interest in vengeance and clemency as contrary shaping motives in the construction of Roman pietas, or "piety," a word whose etymological associations with pity were more evident to early modern audiences than they are today. The play is also informed by a tension in Renaissance philosophy between Augustinianism and Stoicism regarding the relative merits of clemency and pity as social and religious values. These divergent and sometimes contradictory ideas about pity, clemency, and piety in the play resonate not only with Elizabethan perceptions of imperial Rome but also with Elizabethan culture's perceptions of its own historical and mythological connections to ancient Troy and, by extension, the Roman Empire. But the play's consideration of these values also reflects an understanding of the practical, everyday circumstances that Shakespeare's playgoers surely contended with themselves when confronted with public spectacles of punishment and execution, when engaged in civic and legal affairs, and when evaluating their social connections with fellow citizens, especially those experiencing distress and suffering in their manifold forms.

Memories of Medieval Iberia in Early Modern Spain: The romancero viejo As Neomedievalism

This article proposes a new reading of four romances viejos as one of the earliest forms of neomedievalism in early modern Spain. First printed in the sixteenth century, but set between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, these romances emphasize Christian Iberia’s fragmentariness and disempowerment in relation to other medieval polities. This contrasts with other sixteenth-century neomedievalisms, from maurophile rewritings of the fifteenth-century Nasrid Kingdom of Granada to romances fronterizos. It concludes that they remind their early modern audiences of Iberia’s porosity and historic as well as ongoing interactions with other Mediterranean and northern European cultures.

Contingent Images: Looking Obliquely at Colonial Mexican Featherwork in Early Modern Europe

What did early modern European audiences make of the iridescent surfaces of colonial Mexican featherwork? While much previous scholarship relates their appeal to brightness, they also exhibit chromatic instability activated by alterations in the angle of illumination or view. This plurality of viewing experiences mirrored those provided by a range of other popular forms of contingent media such as anamorphic and ambiguous images. In ways both similar and distinct, featherwork exposed conventions of pictorial representation and the limitations of the sense of sight itself, embodying an epistemological dilemma that was especially important to the intellectual culture of seventeenth-century Spain.

Til þess eru ill dæmi að varast þau: Um Bjarna í Efranesi í Skarðsárannál

The post-medieval revival of the annalistic format in Iceland in the early seventeenth century involved a deliberate and very successful decision to align contemporary history-writing with a long and venerable past tradition. Although the post-medieval annals were not structured around an Easter table like their medieval counterparts, they did not record secular history in a modern sense. Temporal time and space existed within an infinitely vaster eternity, and the true goal of earthly life was accepted to be salvation of the soul. Death was represented in meditative literature of the seventeenth century as a life-long journey rather than a single isolated event, during which journey divine punishments might be deservedly meted out to individuals and communities as corrective action for those who strayed from the straight and narrow path. In this context, annals were a means of situating the past, present and future within a single narrative space. Early modern Icelandic annals such as Skarðsárannáll, compiled by Björn Jónsson of Skarðsá (1574–1655), have been approached as a source of well-structured data on very diverse topics, but far fewer studies have examined their internal narrative structure across and within individual entries. The present article focuses on an entry for the year 1553 in Skarðsárannáll that provides a cautionary tale on discipline and justice for early modern audiences. The entry describes the misfortunes of Bjarni of Efranes in Skagaströnd, who killed his first wife for killing their older son for killing their younger son. What has to date been received as a gory historical account of a chain of deaths set in motion by a mother’s inappropriate threat to castrate her misbehaving young sons is actually a hitherto unknown Icelandic variant of a well-known tale type, AT 2401/ATU 1343* (“The Children Play at Hog-Killing”). Very close parallels can be found in contemporary folklore collected in the twentieth century (Brunvand 03250, “The Mother’s Threat Carried Out”), and the narrative in Skarðsárannáll supports the circulation of older versions of ATU 1343* involving a castration threat. Comparison with a letter written by Bishop Guðbrandur Þorláksson of Hólar suggests that the character of Bjarni of Efranes in Skarðsárannáll is partly based on a farmer in Skagaströnd whose son died suddenly while fishing with a neighbour and his three grown sons. The incident was not investigated as a possible murder case until many years later, but one of the sons was arrested in c. 1611. The bishop’s letter indicates concern that fair judicial procedure had not been followed in detaining the man, who was later released. There was no evidence that murder had taken place, and the accused swore that the young man had died of natural causes. The case was never prosecuted, but it was an unsatisfactory conclusion for all parties involved, and Skarðsárannáll demonstrates that the suspects were widely believed to be guilty within their local community. According to Skarðsárannáll, the neighbour and all three of his sons met a miserable end as starving vagrants in a famine soon thereafter. The narrative implies that death by famine is their punishment for the crime they attempted to conceal. Through the connection of this event to ATU 1343*, the narrative also suggests the guilt of the victim’s family as an explanation for the apparent failure of justice in the case: the victim is the third son of Bjarni of Efranes. Bjarni supposedly walked three times barefoot around Iceland as a penance for the sin of killing his first wife before settling at Efranes, but even this deed was inadequate justice for slaying his spouse, and his temporal life was one of a condemned man. Although he remarried and attempted to start a new life, murder carried the penalty of death, and penance was inadequate to atone for such an act in post-Reformation Iceland. Just as in other versions of ATU 1343* circulating in early modern Europe, Bjarni of Efranes died of grief. As this is a Lutheran exemplum, no saints could materialise to bring him comfort: the practice of life-long repentance was his only hope of salvation.

Early Book Collections and Modern Audiences: Harnessing the Identity/ies of Book Collections as Collective Resources

This article summarizes and contextualizes the discussions of a workshop held at Durham University in November 2018. In this workshop, participants (including academics, students, independent scholars, special and rare books librarians, and archivists) discussed the notion of the collection (that is, the identity of collection as a whole, rather than just its constituent parts), and its potential to serve as a means of engaging both scholarly and public audiences with early book cultures. This study sets out a series of considerations and questions that might be used when tackling such special collections engagement projects, including ones involving more modern collections than the case studies examined here.

What did Early Modern Audiences Relish About Hamlet’s Ghost?

What did Early Modern Audiences Relish About Hamlet’s Ghost?

Catcalls and Live Chat: Or, How Livestreamed Performances Illuminate the Early Modern Audience

Catcalls and Live Chat: Or, How Livestreamed Performances Illuminate the Early Modern Audience

Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom

Reviewed by: Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom Mike Sell GAMING THE STAGE: PLAYABLE MEDIA AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH COMMERCIAL THEATER. By Gina Bloom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018; pp. 304. Theatre historians generally agree that the play's the thing, but what exactly do we mean by "play"—and what do we assume is played? The usual answer is the dramatic script, certainly, or more broadly, the text, whether it be printed, devised, or intertextual. We might think of the playful process of theatre creation, whether the provisional "games for theatre" that enable performers to attune mind and body to the task at hand or the more constitutive forms of play we associate with devised theatre. Those versed in the broader spectrum of performance practices will recall Richard Schechner's abiding interest in the varieties of human play and their integral relationship to performance more generally. But despite our love of play, theatre historians have mostly ignored the kinds of play associated with recreational games: cards, boardgames, tabletop role-playing games, and the like. And they have ignored the skills that players of games bring to the arts. There are signs of change if you know where to look, but unfortunately those are mostly in the present tense and are often framed in digital terms—immersive theatre, augmented reality, new media performance, videogames. In Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, Gina Bloom not only corrects these shortcomings, she also describes an innovative and authentically playful transmedia theatre-historical method. It is a tour de force, the [End Page 256] kind of book that could be written only by someone with comprehensive knowledge of their period, an acute sensitivity to the embodied experience of theatre and gaming, a firm critical-theoretical hand, and practical grounding in the design of playful theatrical experiences. Bloom begins in the present tense, noting the unprecedented growth of games as popular pastime and the evidently unstoppable devolution of theatre into an elite entertainment. In response, she asks a pair of questions that implicates both present and past: "What do theatrical plays and games have in common, for their producers and their spectators? And what can we learn about gaming and about theater by uncovering the links between these media forms?" (1–2). The answers Bloom finds shed light on old stages and new media alike and provide useful lessons to both historians and creators of theatrical entertainments. As she notes, "the earliest commercial theaters of Shakespeare's era, known as 'playhouses,' were built right next to gaming establishments; some of these … even doubled as blood sport venues" (1). This geographical coincidence reflected a broader coincidence of ludic cultures and the need for makers of one of them (the theatre) to appeal to consumers of the other (games and sports). "The commercial theater," Bloom writes, "was fashioned as a gaming apparatus for its consumers, whose spectator-ship was participatory, albeit in ways that might be missed at first glance" (3). Thus it follows that one can learn about both by examining the formal and cultural coincidence of playful practice. To this end, Bloom surveys in the first chapter the material record of "sitting pastimes" in Western Europe (cards, boardgames, and the like) and attitudes toward them expressed by cultural authorities. Reflecting her interest in closing the distance between present and past, she emphasizes a characteristic of gameplay of special importance to twenty-first-century game scholars: that games are first and foremost information systems, and that game play is fundamentally an engagement with such systems. It turns out we share that concern with the early moderns. In the next three chapters, she focuses on three popular pastimes—cards, backgammon, and chess—and the plays in which they feature, demonstrating how they engage "a whole set of epistemological concerns about the flow and control of information—a concern of political and religious authorities at the time" (29). Considered together, they show us how early modern audiences perceived and practiced gameplay, as well as how they perceived and practiced a new kind of play: going to the theatre. This is...

Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London. By Musa Gurnis

Musa Gurnis’s Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling is a deeply researched, methodologically sophisticated, and interpretively compelling intervention in current studies of the relationship between the post-Reformation religious landscape and the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century commercial drama. Gurnis offers a fresh conceptualization of that relationship, supplying terms that deliberately jostle against now-standard narratives of the early modern theater’s role in processes of secularization, in messages of Erasmian toleration, or in the transmission of explicit, if dramatized, doctrine. In their place, Gurnis describes a theater of confessional entanglement, mediation, and “imaginative stretching.” Early modern plays, she writes, “dr[e]w contradictory scraps of confessional practice together in powerful fantasies that reconfigured existing structures of thought and feeling” (1). Above all, they “lure[d] playgoers astray from their everyday religious orientation” (3). This key claim—that when early modern playgoers entered the playhouse they walked into a space of emotional and experiential “micromovements” (5)—is grounded in Gurnis’s nuanced weaving together of religious history, cultural materialism, and performance studies. Such a methodological frame emphasizes heterogeneity: the heterogeneity of early modern religious practices, the heterogeneity of early modern performance practices, and the heterogeneity of the effects on audiences of these practices. But Gurnis’s most striking example of heterogeneity is that of the early modern audience itself, a group whose “mixed faith” informs her readings of a stimulating range of plays.

“Earth's Complaint” and other SF Poems by Margaret Cavendish

159 SF POEMS BY MARGARET CAVENDISH REVIEW-ESSAYS E. Mariah Spencer “Earth’s Complaint” and other SF Poems by Margaret Cavendish Cavendish, Margaret. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: Poems and Fancies with The Animal Parliament. Ed. Brandie R. Siegfried. Toronto: Iter, 2018. xx+462 pp. $59.95 pbk. Of the commonly noted ancestors of modern sf, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, stands out as a singular example. While many genre theorists and historians recognize the Duchess’s contribution to the field, the focus has primarily been on her “science-fictional romance” (3) The Blazing World (1666).1 As Brandie Siegfried’s 2018 edition of Poems and Fancies (1653) clearly demonstrates, however, Cavendish was exploring scientific concepts from the moment of her first publication. Using the heroic couplet with iambic pentameter and generally short, single stanza verses, the poems included in Poems and Fancies offer “a witty, entertaining primer on the manifold parts and powers of nature: atomic motion and form, biological regeneration and disintegration, magnetic pull and repulse, planetary motion and tidal patterns” (2). Siegfried effectively provides us with Cavendish’s early sf poetry in a critical edition with fully modernized spelling and punctuation. The scholarly apparatus of this text is impressive, with its contextualizing footnotes and vocabulary glosses making the work fully accessible to modern readers for the first time. Prior to this publication, the only ways in which Poems and Fancies could be accessed—without visiting a special collections library—were through print-on-demand copies via Scolar Press and the digitized versions available through the subscription databases Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Literature Online (LION). Siegfried’s introduction competently explains the social and intellectual contexts for Poems and Fancies, while steering clear of academic jargon that might discourage the non-specialist reader. Her exposition is straightforward and her research is well documented, which is a necessity given that, as Siegfried notes, “Poems and Fancies took shape as a kind of intellectual cartography as Cavendish carefully mapped for herself a view of the scientific terrain” (7). It contains 270 poems divided into five sections with asides and dedications interspersed throughout, as well as a prose parable, The Animal Parliament. Building on Sara Mendelson’s work on The Blazing World (2016), Siegfried presents Cavendish as a creative scientific thinker, whose universe is full of “intelligent, self-organizing matter” (2). Indeed, much of her oeuvre can be read as extended thought experiments posing the question: What if all matter is sentient? With Poems and Fancies, Cavendish articulates for an early modern audience a secular world-view in which matter and the forces of nature 160 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) are self-directed. In her opening poem to the volume, “Nature Calls a Council, Which Is Motion, Figure, Matter, and Life, to Advise about Making the World,” she personifies each of these natural forces. While Motion, Figure, Matter, and Life remain subservient to Nature, they are imbued with their own agency and purpose: When Nature first the World’s Foundation laid, She called a council, how it might be made. Motion was first, which had a subtle wit, And then came Life, and Form, and Matter, fit. Nature began. “My friends, if we agree, We can and may do a fine work,” said she, “And make some things which us may worship give, Whereas now we but to our selves do live. Besides, it is my nature things to make, To give out work, but you directions take. (75) In this excerpt, Cavendish recasts creation with Dame Nature at center stage, positing a secular—and intentionally fictional—explanation for the creation of the world. She inverts the patriarchal hegemony of the Christian tradition through her gendering of the natural forces as female, thus beginning a long tradition of feminine influence in sf, which we see carried through to Mary Shelley and the pulp writers of the early twentieth century. Siegfried acknowledges that Cavendish’s poems “do not fit familiar literary categories such as pastoral, lyric, devotional, erotic, or epic, although they do make use of features from each of these poetic forms” (23). Instead, what I have noted is that Cavendish presents something altogether new. Of the...

Interpreting the Gitana: Translation and Cross-Dressing in Lope de Rueda’s Medora

This study examines translation and cross-dressing in Lope de Rueda’s play, Medora. While Medora is translated from Gigio Artemio Giancarli’s play Zingana, whose title showcases the Gypsy, Rueda’s title announces transformation—Medora is a perpetually feminized version of the gender-bending Medoro. The play’s central drama involves the shifting identities of Gargullo and the Gitana. Building on Sidney Donnell’s perception of the early modern audience’s metatheatrical response to the male actor playing the Gypsy, which underscores a male actor playing the Gitana, I argue that in Medora, cross-dressing functions within an even larger system of translation that encompasses the fluid exchange between Spanish and Italian theatre. This study suggests that Lope de Rueda’s Medora—exemplified by a Gitana cross-dressed ostensibly in traditional Gypsy garb­­ and the self-declared converso and indiano, Gargullo—underscores the importance of transformation, translation, and cross-dressing in the genesis of the emerging Spanish Comedia.

Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity by Nichole E. Miller

Religion & Literature 192 tion of the human-made commonalities between theatrical and religious narrative, masques, and musical deceptions is rather a cause for cautious celebration” (189). Her reading of The Winter’s Tale, in which she suggests that the potentially deceptive qualities of music are the same qualities that allow it to function as a means of healing, is particularly persuasive. Staging Harmony is admirable both in its historical scope and its meticulous attention to detail. The readings of the individual plays are impressively nuanced. Brokaw is particularly sensitive to the ways in which parody can prove unstable, particularly when music is involved. She frequently reminds the reader that even a mocking send-up of the liturgy, for instance, may recall to some listeners the moving power of the original. Throughout, Brokaw draws on previous scholarship and a wide range of historical materials to cast new light on how early modern audiences might have responded to musical performance in the theater. This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the drama, music, and religious controversies of the 16th century. Erin Minear William & Mary Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity Nichole E. Miller Northwestern University Press, 2014. x + 245 pp. $79.95 cloth, $34.95 paperback. Nichole E. Miller’s Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity is an important recent contribution to a now well-established body of scholarship that stages encounters between early modern drama and twentieth-century political, and especially politico-theological, thought. Moderns including Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Kantorowicz themselves turned to early modern texts to articulate genealogies of their own historical moment and of the problem of political theology, understood variously as an inherent religious dimension of political authority, as a historical and conceptual crisis that arises when theological legitimation of political power no longer appears convincing, or, more broadly, as the analogies, exchanges, and oppositions that at once bind together and pull apart religious and political life. In part as a result of their unorthodox theses and in part because they often seemed to subordinate textual commentary BOOK REVIEWS 193 to argumentation of a different kind, to larger claims about modernity as such, works like Schmitt’s Political Theology, Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies have long occupied some middle ground between early modern studies, on the one hand, and theory, on the other. In recent years, however, early modernists such as Julia Reinhard Lupton, Victoria Kahn, Christopher Pye and others have in different ways reclaimed them for their field. As Miller points out, such efforts are always most successful when they seek out and attend to the “productive excess” (3) of encounters between early modern and modern texts: if reading Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of modern politico-theological thought allows us to arrive at unexpected insights about the plays, then early modern texts in turn throw new light on modern thought, illuminating aspects of political theology that the latter may have distorted or left out. Miller’s book identifies one such zone of partial exclusion: she is concerned with “exceptional,”—that is, extra-political—life, with dramatic characters “suspended outside or above what Aristotle defines as the essentially ‘political’ form of life as that of a man among men, a citizen among citizens” (3). According to Aristotle, life apart from political community is either less or more than human, either the life of a beast or that of a god. It belongs either to the outcast who is stripped of citizenship or to the sovereign who transcends the state. Exceptional or bare life is of course already important in Benjamin and later becomes central in Giorgio Agamben’s work. Jacques Derrida, too, engages the Aristotelian distinction between forms of exceptional life, arguing that it ultimately threatens to collapse: the sovereign is always also bestial, and the beast is always also sovereign. According to Derrida, efforts to maintain the distinction between the two rely not least on hierarchies of sexual difference, that is, on figuring the sovereign as masculine and the bestial as feminine. Miller follows this line of thought, aiming in this...

Climate as climax in Shakespeare’s Plays

Thanks to the recent advent of ecocriticism in the field of Shakespeare studies, we are becoming increasingly aware that the representation of climate in early modern drama intersects with discourses on crops and food as well as on race and humours. Yet, as climate resists being represented, few critics think of considering its role per se. What did it really bring to early modern audiences? Keeping in mind the Greek etymology of “climate”, klineio or “slope” (latitude), is quite useful to account for a number of references linked to the humoral physiology that prevailed at the end of the sixteenth century. Unsurprisingly, Shakespeare is concerned with the ways in which the local weather durably affects the nature of men as well as with the way their humours are temporarily modified, through the skin, by climate and environment. I argue that this concern actually prompts him to reverse the traditional points of view in order to show that things also work the other way round. Indeed, in some of his plays, the playwright insists on men’s unfortunate capacities to provoke violent climatic (and climactic) disorders and to generate chaos on earth. As an example of the interactions between men and weather in Shakespeare’s drama, I will explore climate as climax in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear. Indeed, in these three works, action is framed by, grounded in, and focused on severe climatic conditions.

Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads by Williams, Sarah

Reviewed by: Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads by Williams, Sarah Judith Bonzol Williams, Sarah, Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads, Farnham, Ashgate, 2015; hardback; pp. 240; 9 b/w illustrations, 3 music examples; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781472420824. Historians of gender and witchcraft have long recognized the importance of broadside ballads in disseminating and reinforcing ideas and stereotypes about witches and other so-called transgressive and disorderly women in early modern communities, but little detailed study has been done in this area, no doubt because of the elusive nature of broadside balladry and a deficiency of musicologists amongst early modern historians. As a musicologist of some note, Sarah Williams’s contribution to the field is therefore very welcome. In Damnable Practises, she builds upon the work of Amanda Winkler, Frances Dolan, Tessa Watt, Christopher Marsh, and others by applying her extensive knowledge of early modern English broadside ballads and music to demonstrate how witches, scolds, and husband murderers were represented and characterized in broadside ballads and their accompanying music. Williams is ultimately concerned with the shaping of musical and acoustic stereotypes of female transgression by the London publishers of broadside ballads in the seventeenth century. She provides an excellent overview of the development, printing, promoting, and performance of broadside ballads in early modern England, before focusing on broadside ballads produced in London that deal specifically with witchcraft and female transgression. As broadside ballads were widely circulated as text, and transmitted orally through street and theatre performances, they were indeed an important tool, reflecting and reinforcing female stereotypes, and shaping gender [End Page 194] hierarchies and moral values. Williams considers the ways in which the textual, musical, visual, and performative characteristics of these ballads influenced their reception by early modern audiences and contributed to perceptions of transgressive women in the early modern community. Every aspect of broadside balladry is considered, including the use of fonts in the text, the use and reuse of woodcut imagery to reinforce stereotypes, musical accompaniment and repetition of certain tunes, public display and performance, reception by audiences, and the intersection of broadside balladry and theatre. There are some problems with Williams’s discussion of the cultural and historical context of gender, witchcraft, and female disorder. It is, of course, difficult to come up with new material in this heavily explored area, but Williams’s treatment of witchcraft in early modern England is superficial. She draws selectively from secondary sources to demonstrate that pagan rituals and agrarian traditions, ingrained in the English consciousness, contributed to fear of and prejudice against loquacious women in early modern England. While there were certainly remnants of pagan practices and beliefs in early modern witchcraft, her emphasis on witch-cults is misleading, not least because evidence of their existence has been convincingly dismissed by historians. Furthermore, Williams’s statement that witchcraft prosecutions increased under James I is mistaken (p. 37), and she conflates the witch hunters of the disruptive Civil War period with King James and the Jacobean period. To advocate her position on gender bias, Williams also neglects to point out the discrepancies between the prevalent depictions of women burned at the stake for witchcraft and domestic crime in broadside ballads and the historical records. Women convicted of witchcraft in early modern England were not burned but hanged, and while it was stated in law that women found guilty of murdering their husbands should be burned at the stake, only a small minority of husband murderers were burned: the majority were hanged, and a small number were pardoned. This discrepancy warrants some discussion, as it surely reveals something significant about the stereotypical depictions of women in the ballads. While there is no doubt that witchcraft was a gendered crime, Williams’s argument for gender bias using spurious claims and inadequate discussion detracts from the overall value of her work, as does the misquote from John Boys in the heading for Chapter 4, ‘Auditories are like Fairies’ (p. 111), which mistakes ‘Faires’ for ‘Fairies’. Williams’s failure to create an accurate historical context for witchcraft beliefs does not detract from her detailed exploration of the...

Politics on Stage

Politics on Stage David Womersley (bio) Peter Lake How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays new haven, conn.: yale university press, 2017 xvi + 666 pages; isbn: 9780300222715 peter lake's new study of the Shakespearean history play is, in his own words, "a history book that attempts to use the history play broadly defined as a way to think about the political thought and culture of the Elizabethan fin de siècle" (16). That moment, Lake argues, was obsessed with a single issue: the succession to the old and childless queen. And it is through the lens of that one issue that he views a range of Shakespearean plays that address not just the English past but also classical antiquity (Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida) and post-Reformation Nordic politics (Hamlet). The world does not lack political interpretations of these plays. What is fresh in Lake's study? In the first place, he separates himself from Marxist approaches (in which politics is merely epiphenomenal) and from more recent New Historicist readings, which he acutely recognizes as mere gestures toward history and politics, camouflaging aesthetic readings in the verbal trappings of historicism. In this account, politics has genuine agency, and "the theatre was an integral part of these attempts to create, shape, appeal to, and if regicidal push ever came to Marian shove, to mobilise, a protestant political nation" (22). For Lake, Shakespeare did not stand above the tug and scamble of his moment. He fends off the old argument that Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time by reinterpreting the openness of the plays to multiple interpretations (which in the past has been taken as the sign of Shakespeare's cleverly wriggling free from the confines of his period) as a defensive strategy adopted in the face of severe reprisals for political heterodoxy: "The relative scarcity of instances in which we can actually watch the [End Page 675] institutions of the state controlling, editing or suppressing a book or play should not be taken only as a function of the paucity of the sources, still less as evidence for the absence or lightness of control or 'censorship.' Rather it was a testament to the relative success of the regime in laying down clear parameters outside of which people would stray only in the most extreme of circumstances and only then by risking the most serious of consequences" (55–56). Shakespearean ambivalence is thus transformed from the signature of his myriad-mindedness to evidence of his thorough immersion in the instrumental use of the theater: "Shakespeare's serial multivocality, his entirely self-conscious and repeated determination to open up the stories being staged in his plays to multiple interpretations or applications was in itself intensely political" (50). To what end did Shakespeare engage with what Lake asserts was the key political issue of the day, namely the succession to Elizabeth? A striking feature of Lake's discussion is his decision to read these plays in relation to the historical discussions contained in a series of Roman Catholic tracts published from the early 1570s until the mid-1590s, in particular Robert Parsons's fascinating (but surely niche?) pamphlet A Conference about the Next Succession. Lake sees Shakespeare going over the same historical ground as the authors of these tracts, but to different effect, particularly in respect of the crucial reigns of King John and Richard II (the former being the reign in which the largest number of history plays is set—an indication of the absorbing interest it held for early modern English audiences): "Shakespeare [used] his versions of the reigns of King John and Richard II definitively to reject Parsons' view, . . . that England was an elective monarchy, with a residual right, lodged in the commonwealth, to divert the succession, resist and even depose a peccant or tyrannical prince" (584–85). At the same time, Lake detects in Shakespeare's history plays a markedly anti-Puritan energy. And, turning now from the theater to politics, Lake argues for a congruence between the characteristic ambivalences and preoccupations of the Shakespearean history play and the schemes and projects emanating from the circle of...