Early Modern Drama Research Articles

Slippery Pirates: Generic Conventions and Discursive Instability in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s Pirate Plays

The term piracy marks a slippery category in early modern England: as a legal denomination, it describes the feats of armed robbery at sea for which pirates were prosecuted but their state-sanctioned counterparts, privateers, were not; in a seaman’s professional life, being a pirate was often a phase rather than a stable marker of self-identification. Like their real-life models, literary pirates are contradictory creatures—they shed their pirate identity as quickly as they have adopted it, are used for veiled socio-political commentary, or trimmed to size in order to fit generic constraints. The slipperiness of the pirate has made him (and sometimes her) an attractive figure for early modern playwrights. I argue that John Fletcher and Philip Massinger appropriate the discursive instability of piratical individuals for their pirate plays. Rather than looking at the ideological and political implications of piracy, I analyze the pirate figures in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Double Marriage (1621) and The Sea Voyage (1622) as well as in Massinger’s The Renegado (1623–1624) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–1625) as literary creations. Alternating between the heroic and the villainous, their pirates are convenient plot devices that are attuned to the evolving generic conventions of the early Stuart stage in general and early Stuart tragicomedy in particular.

Introduction: Disability in Early Modern Theatre

The introduction to this selection of essays briefly outlines the recent flourishing of scholarship in disability studies and its perhaps rather belated entry into the field of early modern drama. It discusses the broader opportunities presented by synthesizing developments in disability theory with research on early modern theatre and argues for the vital importance of historical disability scholarship. While introducing some of the directions that disability scholarship on early modern theatre might take, this introduction argues that studying early modern disability offers innovative ways of imagining difference in bodies and minds both in the past and now.

Beyond Othello: Juan Latino in Black America

This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

Editions of Early Modern Drama Used by T. S. Eliot: A Resource

ABSTRACTThis article details which editions T. S. Eliot actively used to study Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and provides a rationale for the choice of editions listed. It begins by making a case for the crucial influence that early modern drama had on Eliot's poetry and prose and by offering an overview of existing criticism on the topic. It then outlines three major reasons for the importance of knowing which exact editions Eliot used to read the plays. The article provides a detailed explanation of the methodology used to determine the editions, which involved cross-referencing various sources of information, including Eliot's works and several archival documents, as well as comparing the orthography and punctuation of different editions.

Tragic Foundationalism

This essay puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou's theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early modern playwright William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Doing so reveals a new candidate for Hamlet's traditionally hard-to-define hamartia—his "tragic mistake"—while providing an opportunity to theorize the notion of tragic foundationalism.

Vom Adamsspiel zur Adamsoper

The thesis of the birth of opera as a result of late humanistic reception of anti­quity at the turn of the 17th century has been a commonplace idea within the discussion of dramatic genres. Yet the dominant narrative of change or renewal tends to obscure phenomena of continuity and anachronism which are nonetheless relevant for the tradition of premodern theatre. Those residues of an outlasting dramatic tradition are the focus of this paper which is especially concerned with the transitions between the broad stream of medieval liturgical drama and early modern opera. It is to be shown how close the ties in particular are between the new genre of music theatre and the older theatrical models and their continuities. At the same time the specific achievements and innovations of the younger operatic genre can be accentuated even more distinctly. This paper will concentrate on a paradigmatic case from the early times of German music theatre, the Hamburg inaugural opera Adam from 1678, to demonstrate the characteristic links as well as transformations between the traditions of the medieval liturgical and early modern protestant drama and the operatic genre of the 17th century.

The Alchemist and Medieval Faerie Romance

In The Alchemist, Doll's faerie queen is frequently interpreted by critics as representative of Jonson's scepticism toward folkloric belief and superstition. The supernatural-monarch-come-prostitute who appears before Dapper the clerk is thought to be drawn from contemporary accounts of cozeners who would claim to be in contact with the faerie realm in order to part gullible patrons from their money. Jonson's faerie queen thus fits into wider critical discussions on the nature of faeries in Early Modern drama, in which faeries are frequently defined as deriving from rural and domestic folkloric tradition. However, whilst there is certainly some truth to the significance of folklore in representations of faeries on the early modern stage (see Shakespeare's Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example), such arguments have a tendency to downplay the significance of romance in Early Modern society and the ongoing influence of medieval romance convention in the way that faeries are incorporated into Early Modern literature and drama. This essay focuses on The Alchemist as an example of the continued importance of romance in shaping the themes and motifs that are associated with Early Modern faeries. Doll's faerie queen appears as part of a con enacted by the three cozeners, but her role and appearance still draw on certain romance motifs that equate faeries with wealth, aristocracy, and the testing of human morality. Through recognising a connection to romance in Jonson's work, this essay questions how we might better appreciate the meaning of The Alchemist's faerie queen episodes. Jonson, without relinquishing his sceptical approach to the supernatural, uses these motifs as a way of exploring themes of greed, social mobility, and new wealth, themes that permeate throughout the play and throughout his work as a whole.

Laurence Publicover. Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama.

The last twenty years or so has seen a wealth of scholarship on early modern English drama and the Mediterranean. Thanks to work by Daniel Vitkus, Benedict Robinson, Jane Hwang Degenhardt, and many others, we now have a clearer sense of how the English conceived of the Ottoman Empire, Southern Europe, and North Africa. Moreover, we have a clearer sense of how this geographical imaginary was reflected and refracted across a range of plays set in the Mediterranean and/or featuring characterizations of Turks, Jews, Moors. While questions of genre have come up in this work—in particular in relation to romance and tragicomedy (see work by Cyrus Mulready and Valerie Forman)—the tendency has been to interpret early modern drama in the context of the Mediterranean world, often by employing nondramatic sources about its places and its peoples. In Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama, Laurence Publicover both complements and counters this tendency by positing a more immediate context: the theater itself. Drawing more from stage history and repertory studies than from postcolonial theory, Publicover argues that playing companies, and especially individual playwrights, who mounted plays set in the Mediterranean drew as much from literary tradition as from contemporaneous events. As he points out, the Mediterranean is a key locus in medieval romance, even though the genre’s geographical bearings are often distorted by its blend of real and fantastical locations. Dramatic romance, which is sometimes associated exclusively with late Shakespeare, but which could credibly be called early modern drama’s foundational genre, integrated medieval romance’s unfixed coordinates. According to Publicover, the attraction for playwrights lay in no small part in the popularity of such tales, and in large part in the ways that playhouses were equipped to stage space fluidly and dynamically—which is to say, in ways that dovetailed neatly (or not so neatly) with the fluid, dynamic geographies of romance. Hence a play like Clyomon and Clamydes (early 1580s) travels between Denmark and Macedonia while taking in allegorical landscapes such as the dragon-dwelling “Forest of Strange Marvels” and the “Isle of Strange Marshes” (67). In Publicover’s reading of the play, geography is made to fit genre rather than the other way around.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

The Strange Case of Susan Brotes: Rhetoric, Gender, and Authorship in John Fletcher’sThe Tamer Tamed, or How (Not) to Identify an Early Modern Playwright

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Strange Case of Susan Brotes: Rhetoric, Gender, and Authorship in John Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed, or How (Not) to Identify an Early Modern PlaywrightGordon McmullanGordon McmullanKing’s College London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 47, Number 2Fall 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/705890 Views: 211Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2019 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Misha Teramura The Fortunes of Fletcher’s “Against Astrologers”, Modern Philology 118, no.11 (Aug 2020): 130–157.https://doi.org/10.1086/709456

Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. By Will Tosh. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018; pp. xxx + 264, 10 illustrations. $102 cloth, $32.95 paper, $29.65 e-book.

Playing Indoors: Staging Early Modern Drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. By Will Tosh. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2018; pp. xxx + 264, 10 illustrations. $29.65 e-book. - Volume 60 Issue 3

Rhetorical Action and Constitutive Politics

This article reconstructs the concept of rhetorical action to excavate its original, recurrent, and—for many—discomforting links to constitutive politics. By examining the history of rhetorical action through the ancient period to the mid-17th century, I will argue that that relationship between rhetorical action and constitutive politics is a powerful prism for understanding actio. The article's contributions are twofold and compounding. The first is the establishment of a positive account of the relation between actio and constitutive rhetoric for the ancient politicians and early modern dramatists, which pushes the usual bookends of actio's history both backward and forward, providing analytical leverage to critically reflect on its standard history. The second contribution is a demonstration that much of the confusion and discomfort surrounding actio results from formulating actio negatively against its constitutive political threat. In sum, this article contributes to both the theoretical and historical understanding of rhetorical action.

More than “Noise”: Music as Pacemaker in As You Like It

ABSTRACTMusic in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It has often been described as accessory and irrelevant to the plot, as if it could be extracted without harm to the play. This, however, underestimates the power of music to function as pacemaker in early modern drama. An examination of the placement of the songs in As You Like It shows music’s essential role in controlling the dramatic movement, and offers ways of creating communal performances between actors and audience. Music thus governs the structure of the play, as well as its tone and the experience of it. An exploration of music on the Elizabethan stage sets up the discussion of each song in the play through its musical kind, textual history, and agency at the specific moment of the pastoral plot. Songs allow intertextual allusions, points of rest, and creation of fellow feeling between audience members and actors that are intrinsic to both plot and experience of Shakespeare’s drama. Rather than accessory, music in As You Like it, it will become clear, assumes another power to effect change both in its play-world, as well as in ours then and now.

External Extension of Early Modern Drama: Cinematic Adaptation and Appropriation of Edward II.

The aim of this paper is first to investigate historical presumptions of same-sex desire by critics, defining the love of Edward and Gaveston as homosexuality, even if the concept did not exist in early modern. Then, Edward’s subject might be explained as the line of flight which is part of the rhizome turning to Deleuze and Guattari. Third, Derek Jarman’s 〈Edward II〉 movie which Marlowe’s Edward II, a Jacobean play characterizing radical and subverted elements was filmed, will be explored from Jarman’s homosexuality view. Jarman represented Edward and Gaveston’s love and its oppression through the eyes of the present, and audience can notice Jarman’s queer contemporary Jacobean aesthetic in 〈Edward II〉. Furthermore Edward III’s sexual identity will be probed through transgressive cross-dressing and his consumption of his uncle’s blood can be interpreted as multiple crystalline facets by Deleuze, that is, to crystallize the potentiality and gestures towards a queer afterlife encoded in the present. Through these process mentioned, it will be concluded that Marlowe’s Jacobean characteristics will be extended from early modern to today, opening a new thought horizon.

The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage. By Michelle M. Dowd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Illus. Pp. xiii + 290.

The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage investigates the ways in which early modern drama stages and constructs alternatives to the presumably rigid system of primogeniture. Dowd’s central claim is that “early modern theater played a unique and vital role in shaping how patrilineage was understood” (5–6), in no small part because “rightful succession is fundamentally a narrative construct” in the first place (1). The book’s broad scope demonstrates how inheritance was reimagined at all socioeconomic levels, offering an important intervention into the study of lineage, which has primarily focused on royalty and the nobility. Dowd is especially insightful in exploring how the very elements of primogeniture that ought to have enabled its stability were the elements that allowed for interpretation, flexibility, and idiosyncrasy. The word “dynamics” in the title refers both to the functionality of inheritance and its variability, change, and movement. Dowd argues that, while “inheritance, to...

Editorial

The editorial for issue 22.1 acknowledges that Early Theatre has received a SSHRC Aid to Scholarly Journals grant; announces an Issues in Review section on disability and early modern drama planned for issue 22.2; thanks Peter Kirwan for serving as our Book Reviews editor since 2013; and declares that Georgina Lucas will become our new Book Reviews editor.

Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama: Enacting Family and Monarchy. Chanita Goodblatt. New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. ix+256.

<i>Jewish and Christian Voices in English Reformation Biblical Drama: Enacting Family and Monarchy</i>. Chanita Goodblatt. New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. ix+256.

Deconstructing the Authorship of Siempre ayuda la verdad: A Play by Lope de Vega?

In this article I focus on the authorship of Siempre ayuda la verdad, an early modern Spanish play first published in 1635 as part of the volume Segunda parte de las comedias del maestro Tirso de Molina. This drama, which is one of several early modern Iberian plays related to the figure of Ines de Castro, is currently considered by most scholars as penned by Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, probably in collaboration with Luis de Belmonte and maybe even with Tirso de Molina. In the first part of this paper I will examine how this traditional attribution relies on a bibliographic ghost, subjective impressions of style, and the creation of a scholarly discourse based on the repetition of statements—including some explicitly made up—without any critical examination of facts. The possible attribution of this play to none other than Lope de Vega—a name that has been associated with Siempre ayuda la verdad since 1906—has not received specific examination until now. I will proceed to do so in the second part of this paper by using a variety of resources that offer objective criteria: early modern documentation, strophic versification, stylometry, and orthoepy.

Truth, Only More So: Bances Candamo Beyond the Limits of Embodiment

Abstract Bances’ Theatro de los theatros is, without question, an exceedingly odd work of expository prose. However, there are reasons we should try to understand what Bances is up to if we want to understand early modern Spanish drama better, both from a historical perspective and from the perspective of performance. This is because Bances’ real object is the nature of theatrical representation and the nature of what, exactly, is embodied through performance. Bances does not argue that theater is a mirror of life, or that theater is life as it might be, or that theater indicates the reality of something true beyond itself. Instead, Bances says that the staging of a play manifests physically the physical reality of the universe.

Redistributing the Sensible: Genre Theory after Rancière

ABSTRACTAt once omnipresent and undertheorized, genre is what nobody really believes in but everyone tacitly relies upon, whether they are writing literary criticism or consulting a pull-down menu on Netflix. Taking up the portable slogan of Jacques Rancière, that politics is itself a “distribution of the sensible” (partage du sensible), and placing it in dialogue with Rosalie Colie’s assertion that genre systems offer a “fix” upon the world, this article argues for an understanding of genre as an affective filter that enacts a politics of perception, opening and closing down avenues of recognition, feeling and allegiance, encouraging identification in some directions while discouraging it in others. Sir Philip Sidney’s discussion of the “mongrel” form of tragicomedy in the Defense of Poesy is juxtaposed with the varieties of actual dramatic practice of early modern playwrights (including Lyly, Preston, and Shakespeare, who wrote across generic boundaries) in order to assess what a Rancière-inflected genre theory might look like.