Early Modern Performance Research Articles

Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company (review)

Reviewed by: Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company Michael Flachmann (bio) Tim Fitzpatrick . Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiv + 314. $124.95. As its title implies, Tim Fitzpatrick's compendious Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance offers a detailed analysis of the intricate relationship between Renaissance playwrights and the semiotics of received spatial conventions in theaters like the Globe, the Rose, the Red Bull, the Fortune, and the Cockpit. Building on the work of such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Alan Dessen, Leslie Thompson, Mariko Ichikawa, Bernard Beckerman, and others, the author argues convincingly that most early modern stages had two double doors, each approximately six feet wide, that opened onto the stage and hinged back against the tiring house wall. He posits further that instead of a third door, assumed by some scholars to be centrally located, most of these theaters had a concealment space upstage center, cloaked by a curtain, in which characters could hide temporarily, but without access to and from the tiring house. Linking his conclusions to an exhaustive survey of over fifty playscripts ranging from Macbeth and King Lear through Cupid's Whirligig, Hengist King of Kent, The Battle of Alcazar, and A Knack to Know an Honest Man, he moves smoothly through three sequential subdivisions: "Onstage and Offstage Resources in Early Modern Performance," "Establishing a Sense of Place and Fictional World," and the somewhat inelegantly titled "A Spatially-Based Stage Management and Meaning-Making System." Based on what Fitzpatrick calls a "triangular division of the fictional world" (195), each theatrical moment is split into three separate areas: "here," "outwards," and "inwards." That is, the stage represents where the action is currently taking place; the first of the two doors usually leads to the outside world; and the other door generally ushers characters into an interior locus such as a study, bedroom, council chamber, or similarly cloistered environment. Although the author makes concessions based on the extent to which rapid changes of location depend on an audience's ability to "wipe and reset" the spatial connotations of the stage (235), he proceeds to identify the "outwards" and [End Page 241] "inwards" binary doors with a number of intriguing symbolic correspondences. Using, for example, Viola's "Then westward-ho!" in Twelfth Night (3.1.134) and Celia's "West of this place" in As You Like It (4.3.78), Fitzpatrick identifies the stage-left door, which usually leads outward, with fictional west, while the stage-right door points inward toward the east, where "Juliet is the sun" (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.3).1 Similarly, the stage-left "outward" door is most often identified with stereotypical male activity (going off to war, for example), while the stage-right "inward" door, leading frequently to interior domestic spaces, is usually aligned with females. Likewise, he provides evidence that the stage-left door would have reminded audiences of the medieval Hellmouth, while the stage-right door was associated with St. Peter's gate and Heaven ("the elect on the right hand, and the damned, cast into 'outer darkness,' on the left"), thereby identifying the stage-right door with the "high status" locus of "authority, power, and royalty" (222) and designating the stage-left door as the lower-status entrance and exit used more frequently in comic situations. Sequestered oddly in an appendix, Fitzpatrick's most persuasive point is that "early modern playwrights, actors, and audiences shared a sophisticated sense of space and place in performance" (247). In other words, he postulates that the foregoing staging conventions were well known to the authors of these plays (who wrote their scripts based on this shared global shorthand), but also to the actors (who instinctively knew which entrances and exits to use according to their characters' status in the plays and whether they were making an "inward" or "outward" journey from the "place in the middle") and the audiences (who had been tutored by dramaturgical tradition to recognize and decode such signifiers within their theatrical experiences). Especially interesting are the author's contentions about the vast size of most early modern stages: the Fortune, for...

Tim Fitzpatrick. Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company.Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011. xiv + 314 pp. $124.95. ISBN: 978–1–4094–2827–5.

Tim Fitzpatrick. Playwright, Space, and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company.Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011. xiv + 314 pp. $124.95. ISBN: 978–1–4094–2827–5. - Volume 65 Issue 3

Love’s Rites: Performing Prayer in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

In several declarations of devotion addressed to the beloved in the Sonnets, Shakespeare defends what seems like a penchant for rewriting the same poem over and over. Against his beloved’s implicit accusations, the poet compares his apologia in Sonnet 108 to a kind of spoken prayer, a highly ritualized and publicly performed devotional gesture: “like prayers diuine, / I must each day say ore the very same, / Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine / Euen as when first I hallowed thy faire name” (108.5–8). The Sonnet’s argument echoes the beloved’s doubts as to whether or not repeated words have the capacity to express the poet’s love: “What’s new to speake, what now to register, / That may expresse my loue, or thy deare merit?” (108.3–4). Generations of critics of the Sonnets have shared the beloved’s concern, questioning both these poems’ tautologous nature, as well as their theological integrity. Yet what critics have largely overlooked is the Sonnets’ preoccupation with devotional processes that fail to produce sincerity on the part of the one who prays. This essay argues that we can only perceive in full what critics have dismissed as either moral insincerity or aesthetic dullness within the contexts of early modern conceptions of ecclesiastical and secular performance. The author takes as her starting point historical conceptions of early modern performance, with respect to both the professional theater and the state church.

TIFFANY STERN. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England.

Documents of Performance in Early Modern England is a fascinating and compelling monograph, not least because Tiffany Stern's passion for the archival remains of early modern theatre is comparable to the irresistible, insatiable longing that some lesser mortals might feel for the most delectable creations of a Parisian pâtissier. Her previous, well-regarded publications have expressed her kid-in-a-candy-shop enthusiasm for the archival quest, and here, in Documents of Early Modern Performance, she turns her attention specifically towards two categories of material: on the one hand, the documentary evidence that, to a great extent, scholars think they know but that, as Stern demonstrates, bear further scrutiny, and, on the other hand, evidence that is no longer extant but may be inferred by someone with Stern's extensive knowledge of the field. This combination of analysis and inference accounts for both the considerable strengths and the limitations of Stern's project. Stern's sheer delight in the pursuit of archival evidence, her close engagement with the relevant scholarship, and also her own keen intellect, are abundantly clear in this major contribution to early modern theatre research, but the second category of ‘evidence’ is somewhat problematic. Stern's authoritative handling of the actual evidence lends credibility to her speculations, to be sure, and the move from analysis to embellishment is usually clearly signposted, but readers who fail to distinguish between the two categories may run into trouble because Stern's enthusiasm and her imagination sometimes overtake her scholarly circumspection. The absence of the thing itself tends to enlarge its significance, like Proust's madeleines, and the evidence lost to posterity becomes the pretext for flights of fancy that make for an engaging read and align with the tendency of recent novelistic biographies of Shakespeare to couch speculation in a few perhapses and surelys to preserve scholarly modesty.

Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (review)

Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (review)

Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (review)

Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (review)

Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts. By Kim Solga. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. 248. $85 cloth.

Violence against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts. By Kim Solga. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; pp. 248. $85 cloth.

Review of <em>Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts</em> by Kim Solga

Review of <em>Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts</em> by Kim Solga

The Future of Early Modern Race Studies: On Three Ambitious (Enough?) Books

The Future of Early Modern Race Studies: On Three Ambitious (Enough?) BooksThe publication of three important books devoted to early modern race studies marks a watershed moment in the field. Taken together, Sujata Iyengar's Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Pennsylvania, 2005), Virginia Mason Vaughan's Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 2005), and Celia Daileader's Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge, 2005) provide a bold and complex portrait of the current state of, and future outlook for, early modern race studies. Collectively, the books attempt to untangle the meaning of race vis-a-vis color, gender, nationality, and sexuality in the early modern period. Respectively, the books address the taxonomies of and race, the mimetic fissures in performances of blackness, and the disturbing ideological work Shakespeare's Othello has enabled in its various afterlives. All three books make substantial contributions to the field: Iyengar's for the range of its analysis and commitment to sustained close readings; Vaughan's for its focus on actual early modern performance techniques; and Daileader's for its scope and argumentation. As a snapshot of the discipline, the near simultaneous publication of these books allows us to see a challenge facing the future of early modern race studies: how will we address the underlying anxiety about the compatibility of historicist approaches and the desire for social relevance? In this essay, I will assess each book individually before analyzing what their collective presence signals about the future of early modern race studies.Iyengar's Shades of Difference truly broadens the scope of early modern race studies. By analyzing texts that traditionally have not been in the purview of the field, Iyengar asks all early modern scholars to think about what counts as a race text and why. This contribution is invaluable and pushes the boundaries of early modern race scholarship in exciting new directions.Shades of Difference begins by explaining that Iyengar's model for understanding the development of from mythologies of color stems from Raymond Williams's account of social change in terms of and emergent structures of (3).1 This aptly describes her approach because she is reluctant to construct an overarching narrative, a just-so story, about why and how race and racialism came to exist and figure so largely in our lives (15). Instead, she is interested in teasing out the moments when residual, dominant, and structures of feeling intersect. Organizing her book both temporally and generically, Iyengar argues that literary affiliations (the compulsion of narrative, the longing of lyric, the agendas of masque, and the escape of romance) entangle with variable concepts of skin and racial distinctions (1). In order to untangle this knot, Iyengar usually focuses on providing detailed close readings of a stunning variety of literature. Her book ranges from analyses of early modern translations of classical texts, lesser known early modern plays, poems, travelogues, and masques, to Restoration romances and scientifica. The breadth of Iyengar's study is remarkable in the way it opens the field textually and eschews the well-hewn road of most early modern race scholarship (Othello, for example, is only briefly mentioned).Shades of Difference is divided into three parts, and in the first part, Ethiopian Histories, Iyengar addresses the Renaissance employment of two key classical texts: Heliodorus's ancient Greek romance, Aithiopika or Ethiopian Story, and the biblical Song of Solomon or Song of Songs. In her analysis of the early-modern appropriation of these texts, Iyengar convincingly argues that blackness becomes increasingly problemized and written out as the presence of Africans in Britain increases and as the new, scientific - called by Samuel Johnson 'metaphysical' - poetry emerges (12). …

Touring, Women, and the Professional Stage

Early modern performance records document that women touring professionals were an accepted part of the performance culture of early modern England. Although some work has been done on these records, this work is largely positivist. This article argues that a positivist approach to reading performance records of female itinerants needs to be paired with an approach which acknowledges that the remaining records cannot be taken as a representative sample of what occurred and that the records themselves are slippery, biased, and grounded in the time and place of a singular instance. Instead of being a failure of the surviving body of records, this aspect of the records can be an opportunity to recover the ideological valence of the performances of itinerant women.

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (review)

Reviewed by: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Laury Magnus Greenblatt, Stephen . 2004. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton. $26.95 hc. $14.05 sc. 390 pp. Stephen Greenblatt pursues a painterly rather than linear approach to his biographical tale of Will in the World, elaborating several central narratives at the heart of Shakespeare's life: Shakespeare as the transgressive "personator/impersonator" of nobility and kings; Shakespeare as the creator of a linguistic philosopher's stone whose words transmuted his curiosity, keen observation, and absorbed reading into a new vocabulary of imagination; Shakespeare as the consummate theater professional/ entrepreneur wholly committed (to the probable exclusion of involvement in his married life) to his work as actor, performer, share owner/writer for the early modern stage; and last but not least, Shakespeare as a man of dual religious consciousness whose enforced public adherence to Church of England observances likely masked a dangerous inner allegiance to the rituals of the old faith. It is this last guise which, for Greenblatt, leads to Shakespeare's final development as the world's greatest dramatist of inwardness. Greenblatt conjoins the life of the artist and the life of his art, elaborating what he persuasively argues to be these central narratives of Shakespeare's life. Thus, Will in the World stands ultimately as an illuminated reading of Shakespeare's works while drawing on them to supplement the gaps, cruxes, and often too slender threads of historical documents. If it sometimes requires a grain of salt, Greenblatt's speculation yields page upon page of delectation. An example is his discussion of A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose genesis is traced to what the young Will may have seen at Queen Elizabeth's sumptuous royal progress and stay at Kenilworth Castle. Here Will probably witnessed elaborate entertainments of fireworks, pageants, bearbaiting, acrobatics, and a water pageant, along with a "catalogue of theatrical catastrophe" that plagued a Coventry Hock Tuesday performance, mishaps the Queen graciously overlooked, commanding a second performance a week later. Greenblatt connects Will's possible presence at the grand spectacle to nuanced layers of joyous mockery that make A Midsummer Night's Dream play-within-the-play something far greater than a comically botched job of hobnail-booted rustics put down by condescending nobility: [End Page 226] "What saves the sense of derision from becoming too painful, what keeps it delicious in fact, is the self-possession of the artisans. They are unflappable" (52). This critical appreciation is interwoven with a description of the metatheatrical dynamics of early modern performance: "The laughter that the scene solicits is curiously tender and loving," since Shakespeare also "showed signs of sympathy and solidarity with the rude mechanicals, making them carpenters, bellows-makers, joiners—in fact, the very artisans standing there as groundlings. They too became stage managers, writers" because of the way in which the scene calls upon their "transforming imaginative powers" (53). Greenblatt's discussion of the events surrounding The Merchant of Venice provides a segue into the second half of the book, a true page-turner that tackles the profundity of Shakespeare's great tragedies in their charting of a new world of human inwardness. Here Greenblatt poses intriguing questions about why Shakespeare's "individual talent" eschewed the obvious byways of his sources, creating masterworks that overwhelm and stretch traditional genre and language boundaries to the max. Recounting events surrounding the execution of Roderigo Lopez, the Queen's physician and a converted Jew, Greenblatt's Merchant of Venice chapter focuses on the peculiar way in which Shylock's situation, similar to that of Lopez, hauntingly dominates a play that would much more easily have fit a commercial comic mold had Shakespeare simply stuck to his source and cast Shylock as an over-the-top comic Vice figure. In treating the great tragedies, Greenblatt blends psychobiography and psychohistory to argue that another episode in Shakespeare's life, the death of his son Hamnet, was crucially important to his newly-developing mode of writing. As in his earlier Hamlet in Purgatory, the case is made that drastically-curtailed Protestant rites of mourning for his dead son Hamnet forced Shakespeare's...

Face/Off: Some Speculations on Elizabethan Acting

Certain less "literary" plays provide an informative picture of the place of the performer in Early Modern drama. Works like John a Kent and John a Cumber and The Blind Beggar of Alexandria were both wildly popular and dependent on the appeal of a kind of virtuoso impersonation routine, which this essay compares to John Woo's 1997 thriller Face/Off . Just as that film's stars trade off of their established characteristics, it seems likely that Edward Alleyn parodied his own roles in Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus in the aforementioned plays. The image that emerges, of an Elizabethan theatre that exploited popular trends and actors' established reputations, is at once familiar to modern-day consumers and indicative of an area in desperate need of exploration, if we are to understand the material conditions of Early Modern performance outside of canonical texts.

Early Modern Plays and Performance:Shakespearean Entrances;Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama;Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions;Shakespeare in Performance: A Collection of Essays

In “Early Modern Plays and Performance,”David Carnegie reviews four studies of early modern drama, principally Shakespeare, that consider aspects of the history of performance in relation to modern understandings of these theatrical works. Three are edited volumes of essays: Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama; Hardin L. Aasand, Stage Directions in Hamlet; and Frank Occhiogrosso, Shakespeare in Performance. The fourth book under review is Mariko Ichikawa, Shakespearean Entrances. Two of the studies concern stage directions in performances and editions, one in a single play (Hamlet). One essay volume focuses on the myriad material considerations raised by earlymodern props and staging, while another treats a range of issues encountered in modern stagings. 456 david carnegie This content downloaded from 157.55.39.127 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 04:02:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Ravishing Strides: Signs of the Peripatetic in Early Modern Performance

Actors' feet are accepted as part of their expressive equipment – but doubts are often expressed that this has always been so. The evidence of early English theatre history is adduced to suggest otherwise, while recent treatments of the peripatetic in literary studies argue that the ‘visible walk’ attains prominence only in the Romantic period. But David Roberts argues that, from the emergence of permanent theatres, walking offered a metonymy for performance which persisted throughout the seventeenth century. Cross-dressing highlighted the expressive potential of the feet, while close examination of play-texts implies evolving styles of the peripatetic in performance, and the scenic theatres of the Restoration frequently portrayed walking as a cultural activity bound up with the status of both actors and scenery in post-revolutionary London. David Roberts teaches English and Drama at University College Worcester, and has published widely on theatre and literature from 1550 to 1789. He leads an AHRB-funded project on theatre criticism.