Early Modern Theatre Research Articles

Leaven of Dough, Ferment of Gold: The Breadmaking Analogy in Medieval Metallic Transmutation

This paper traces the analogy between the making of bread with ferment (leaven or yeast) and theories of metallic transmutation throughout the Middle Ages. For this purpose it surveys several medieval alchemical writings, including Hortulanus’s influential Commentary on the Emerald Tablet. In this work, the ferment, an essential ingredient of the philosophers’ stone, is portrayed less as an active agent and more as the passive, nutritive earth (terra nutrix) which combines with the soul (anima) in order to yield the stone (lapis). I argue that the background of these theories has both a practical and a medical-theoretical dimension. The practical aspect derives from historical everyday practices of making bread from sourdough, and using old yeast “starter” as a kind of inoculum to speed up the fermentation of a new batch of fresh dough. The medical-theoretical framework for the understanding of ferment action was likely provided by the widely influential Galenic idea of whole substance action (Gr. καθ᾽ὅλην τὴν οὐσίαν, Lat. tota substantia), initially developed by Galen in pharmacology and later imported into alchemy via Arabic medicine. Together, these aspects converge into a successful model of “inoculation-emergence,” which underlies many medieval and early modern theories of fermentation, both medical and alchemical.

‘The Private is Political’. The Problem of the Private/Public Divide in the Light of Feminist Theory of the Second Half of the 20th Century

Starting from the slogan ‘The Private is Political’, resounding in the American women’s liberation movement, a feminist critique of the separation of the private (domestic/family) sphere and the public sphere, in its early modern form, is presented. The private sphere, with women assigned to it, is, on the grounds of early modern political theory, outlawed from the rules deemed to apply to the public world, and impregnated from sound analysis and possible reform. The separation of the private and the political masks the interdependence between the two spheres and serves to legitimise gender inequality. Feminist theory problematizes this divide and reveals the complex interplay between private and public. Two themes stand out in the analysis: the subsumption of women under the family based on liberal theories of the social contract, and the idealisation of the domestic sphere, imagined as an emotional and moral refuge, in opposition to the public world, marked by egoism and impersonality. This construction serves an ideological function, reinforcing the separation attributing women to the home and family.

The Playhouse Effect: John Webster, Deixis and Story-Telling in the Theatres of Jacobean London

The recent (2014) inauguration of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, a reconstruction of an archetypal Jacobean indoor playhouse, on London’s Southbank, has led students and scholars of early modern theatre once again to focus attention on original playhouse performances, just as they did when its older sibling Shakespeare’s Globe opened its doors in 1996. The earlier assumption that the differences between open-air amphitheatres and indoor playhouses conditioned the way plays were written and acted is now enjoying a new lease on life, and yet there has been little research conducted in order to substantiate this otherwise perfectly logical intuition. Drawing on the insights of drama theorist Manfred Pfister as well as the linguistic concept of deixis, this article compares the language and plotting of three plays by the Jacobean playwright John Webster: The White Devil, The Duchess of Malfi and The Devil’s Law Case. Each play was first staged under significantly different circumstances within the theatrical landscape of Jacobean London, which makes them a singularly illustrative case study of how an early modern English dramatist adapted his style in order to meet the demands of the city’s diverse performance conditions.

Az apaszerep funkciói és az engedelmesség foka a kora újkori államelméletekben

In the early modern theories of the state, thinking about governance started from the idea of body politic, through the introduction of passions and the family, to the patriarchal theory of the state, in which the monarch governs the people as a family as head of the family. To the head of the family, like to the monarch, the members of the family, like the people, owe obedience according to the laws of nature. The family has become the interpretative framework for the description of society, in which the monarch, by right of his supremacy, has been transformed into the head of the family. At the same time, the concept of the head of the family has undergone a significant change. The change in the role of the father has been accompanied by a change in the content of obedience as well.

중일(中日) 근대문예론의 형성과 그 이동(異同)에 관한 소고(小考)

This paper attempts to compare the literary theory of Tsubouchi Shoyo(坪內逍遙), which was developed from the 'arts-the arts' examined throughout Wang Guowei's(王國維) literary theory, and Wang Guei's literary theory, which was established as the early modern Japanese literary theory. As Tsubouchi Shoyo's first statement, 'Novels are art(美術)' in 『Shosetsu Shinzui(小說神髓)』 opened the chapter of modern Japanese literary theory, this paper aims to explore Wang Guowei's literary theories in relation to the formation of modern literary theory in China. Therefore, in the case of the formation of Japanese modern art theory, Tsubouchi Shoyo's use of Western literary theory and logic in his own way within the magnetic field of pragmatic thought and literary dance theory that spread throughout Japanese society in the 1880s, while building a literary theory that incorporated the discourse of the Japanese art world at the time, was used as a guide to examine the formation of Chinese modern art theory and Wang Guowei's literary theory treatise. This was further utilized to examine the shifts in the theses that were common to their literary theories. In fact, the formation environment of Sino-Japanese modern literary theory was different in terms of its reception and paragraph situation according to the way the two countries experienced modern East Asia, but there are also similar points. It is also true that Wang Guowei's and Tsubouchi Shoyo's views and arguments on the literary arts developed in very different ways after they published their literary theory works and related papers, depending on their respective life trajectories and the circumstances of their respective countries. Nevertheless, neither Tsubouchi Shoyo nor Wang Guowei built a separate literary theory that completely excluded the dominant discourse in the academic and literary circles of their time. Rather, Wang Guowei, who studied a wide range of disciplines, including mathematics and natural sciences, could be said to have been more attuned to and thought about the axioms of modern China's time and built his literary theories in response to them.

Interesting and Uninteresting Unknowns

This article explores the stark visual and epistemic contrasts between early modern representations of uncertain southern African spaces produced in the metropolitan Dutch Republic and the Cape Colony, respectively. It emphasizes the importance of metropolitan and colonial mapmakers’ different material interests in shaping their disparate visual cultures. Southern Africa was a heterotopia, viewed differently through metropolitan and settler eyes, and its visualization was interest-driven. Thus, the article argues, early modern representations of uncertain southern African topographies should be analyzed neither just as verisimilar descriptions nor as emptied or exoticized fantasies. Rather, the article proposes studying the epistemic and visual cultures of mapping with the perspective-dependent categories of interesting and uninteresting unknowns. Interesting unknowns tended to be illustrated in a straightforward, ostensibly representationalist manner, whereas uninteresting unknowns became sites for mapmakers to project delocalizing fantasies. Based on their dissimilar geopolitical perspectives and material interests, metropolitan Dutch and colonial creolized Cape mapmakers viewed different geographical unknowns as interesting or uninteresting. Thus, this article contends, scholars ought to pay more attention to the unique contexts that shaped their disparate depictions of the unknown.

The description of mourning in Anna Stanisławska’s autobiography: The context of early modern theory of emotion

Summary Anna Zbąska née Stanisławska, a lady of the Polish high aristocracy, wrote the story of her life in 1685 after the loss of her father, a divorce from her first and the deaths of her second and third husband, all of which she experienced in the course of approximately 16 years. She told her life as a narrative in lamentations, in a series of 77 dirges (treny) in which she mourned her beloved ones as well as her own – childless, fruitless – life. Though it has been frequently noted in recent research that the text is dominated by the expression of mourning, this central aspect has not been made a subject of a study in its own right. This article aims to examine the description of mourning by Stanisławska and her way of handling her afflictions by discussing them in the context of conceptualizations of emotions in the seventeenth century.

Reflections on Co-Creativity in Early Modern Drama

Abstract While co-authorship was common practice in early modern drama, poetological treatises remain silent about it. They speak about the poet but not about collaboration. It is, hence, one of the aims of this article to arrive at conceptualisations of co-authorship through immanent reflections of co-creativity and authorial interaction. In particular, we will show that stylistic practices form an essential part of such reflections, which also helps us dissociate style from the identification of individual authorship. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, or Love Lies A-Bleeding have been chosen to show how juxtapositions and adaptations of style in both single-authored and co-authored works reveal practices of collaboration in early modern theatre. As a result of our investigation, elements of a poetics of collaborative playwriting will emerge.

Thinking about Collaboration

When Henry VIII, or All Is True was staged at Shakespeare's Globe in London in May 2022, the production elicited a lukewarm review from Arifa Akbar in the Guardian. The theatre critic stated that "the play itself feels slightly disjointed, perhaps because it was not the Bard's work alone but a collaboration with John Fletcher. There is now the added authorial hand of Hannah Khalil, who edits the text to accentuate women's roles and adds some well-known lines from Shakespeare's other works. Where this should enrich the drama, it exposes its faultlines." Akbar's comment is revealing, and particularly so in the context of this issue's engagement with the varieties of early modern dramatic collaboration. It not only mentions several collaborative practices used in early modern theatre which are explored in the articles brought together for this special issue – co-authorship, adaptation and quotation, to name but three – but also reflects a profound unease towards collaboration in twenty-first-century culture. Henry VIII, Akbar infers, is an imbalanced play because Shakespeare wrote it with somebody else rather than by himself. Akbar also implies that the relationship between these two authors has to be hierarchical, with Shakespeare (aka the inevitably capitalised, solitary ‘Bard’) as the better and Fletcher as the lesser playwright, who is responsible for the play's alleged shortcomings. A similarly dismissive attitude towards Fletcher is reflected in the review's title, which refers to Henry VIII as ‘little-seen Shakespeare’ as a form of skewed advertisement (this is Shakespeare, but not as we know him),2 thus erasing Fletcher's co-authorship completely, only to eventually present his name by way of explaining the play's mediocrity. The review also suggests that the play's merit has been further reduced by Hannah Khalil's contemporary adaptation, which adds too much ‘wokeness’ (the accentuation of women's roles) as well as too much middle-class Shakespeare (the well-known lines recognisable for those who know their Shakespeare inside out). In short, the review relies on a hierarchy well established in (traditional) literary criticism: Shakespeare is the epitome of playwrighting, and his solo-authored plays are the gold standard of early modern English drama; his co-authored plays are diminished by the lesser dramatic ability of his collaborators (where Shakespeare is sprezzatura, Fletcher is learned rhetoric); adapters have even more limited authorial skills and, therefore, an adapted play is a ‘lesser’ play because of the adapter's ‘interference’. As Akbar's review showcases, the notion of dramatic co-authorship, especially Shakespeare's, is still routinely met with scepticism and disdain in public discourse. Rather than enriching a play, three cooks (Shakespeare, Fletcher, Khalil) have spoiled the broth.

What Is Early Modern Dramatic Collaboration?

Abstract In this article we scrutinise the anti-theatrical bias implicit in attempts to distinguish between Shakespeare and his collaborators; we attempt a taxonomy of the many different forms that collaborative practice took in the early modern theatre; and we examine the extent to which scholarly attitudes to early modern dramatic collaboration, particularly the tendency to see it as a vertical hierarchy rather than horizontal partnership, are shaped by modern ambivalence to academic collaboration in the humanities.

The Interactive Verbal Network of Early Modern Theatre

Abstract To enrich characterisation and bond with audiences, Jacobethan playwrights included Classical tags, Bible verses and vernacular quotations in their work. Borrowings from other plays were particularly effective: a line of dialogue could ‘go viral’ straight from the stage. This verbal network, linking hundreds of early modern plays by one-liners, names and catchphrases, can now be investigated through the WordWeb-IDEM database, which contains over ten thousand text extracts that quote each other. The part of John Marston in this dramatic intertextuality is as yet under-researched. He saturated his writing with others’ words extensively and idiosyncratically; tracing these overlaps with Marston's unwitting ‘collaborators’ richly illustrates the research potential offered by the WordWeb-IDEM corpus and its search options.

Difficult Articulacy: Rhetoric, Disability and Early Modern Styling of Bodymind

In early modern theories of ‘proper’ style, ambiguously, difficulty could convey a sense of excellence on one hand (of national belonging, imperial ambition or manly ‘virility’) while also being deployed to denigrate unseemly (too feminine or foreign) speech. Difficulty erupts precisely in the points of friction: when boundaries around ablebodymindedness are drawn or when the available forms of expression are insufficient. Instead of eradicating difficulty altogether, I sift through early modern French, English and Italian writing on rhetoric to make a case for paying closer attention to difficulty, lingering with it, and seeing what these friction points ultimately reveal. The contemporary concept of ‘disability gain’ posits disability not as a defect to be remedied, erased or cured, but rather as a mode of being in the world that allows for innovation, creativity and even added affects, resources or alternative epistemologies. Instead of considering, in the pedagogical domain, how to construct conceptual ‘on-ramps’ for simplifying difficulty, what would we gain by leaning into the unclear, uncertain and potentially joyful ‘other’ forms of communication itself, such as dysfluency, stuttering or Remi Yergeau’s concept of the rhizomatic neuroqueer?

The Deceived: Lope de Rueda and Improvisation on the Sixteenth-Century Spanish Stage

ABSTRACT Lope de Rueda’s plays, among them Los engañados (The Deceived, 1558?), met great acclaim among contemporaneous audiences. Yet unlike the continued literary prestige enjoyed by the play’s Italian source, Gl’ingannati (The Deceived, 1532), Rueda’s work has been reduced to a sidenote in literary history. Such a decline in the author-actor’s critical fate speaks to the importance of physical performance to his popularity: performance that, this article argues, did not rely on memorized written dialogue. Through a comparison of Los engañados and Gl’ingannati, this article hopes to demonstrate that—plot aside—the Spanish play bears closer resemblance to the improvised Italian plays of the commedia dell’arte than it does to the scripted Gl’ingannati. An analysis of the work’s structure in the light of studies on commedia dell’arte scenarios, and the elements of orality found in its dialogue that imply spontaneous composition, shows Rueda’s play to carry all of the hallmarks of improvisation. As such, this article suggests that improvisation must be recognized as a production mode of early modern theatre well beyond the borders of the Italian peninsula.

Unlyric: The Lute-Object in Early Modern English Poetry

ABSTRACT Considering that early modern poetic theory retains the classical genealogies and iconographies of lyric poetry as song to the accompaniment of a lyre, how can one account for lyrics which portray the poet’s stringed instrument, frequently the lute, as antithetical to his or her poetic aspirations, as a recalcitrant tool that resists the poet’s desires and thus engenders a lyric crisis? This article uses object-oriented ontology (OOO) to think through the lyric poet’s relationship with the lute which, fractured between real object and its sensual qualities, withdraws its essential being from access yet involves the poet in a network of sensual and essentially aesthetic bonds with the instrument. By reading several early modern riddles, sonnets, and other lyrics about deviant lutes as encounters between human and nonhuman objects, the article traces the poetics of unlyric — a form of poetry that disentangles poiesis from musical subjectivity and harmony, articulating instead a vision of lyric as fraught negotiations between entities whose forces lie beyond the powers of human art.

“All this is but forgery”. Gender and Performative Concerns in Fletcher and Massinger’s Love’s Cure (1615)

The instability of the medical definition of human sex and gender in early modern times was such that “male” and “female” became a matter of performance rather than pure biology. This paper aims to show that the Jacobean play Love’s Cure (1615) exposes how not only gender, but also society and its codified behaviours (e.g., honour) are artificial, conventional constructions. The analysis of the text will rely on metatheatrical references and dynamics in the play, but also on early modern medical theories and cultural phenomena such as clothing and the carnivalesque-like exceptionality of theatre.

William Byrd’s Come, woeful Orpheus in context: motion as visual and musical affect

Abstract Looking at William Byrd’s consort song Come, woeful Orpheus (1611) and the Orpheus overmantel at Haddon Hall (Derbyshire), this article imagines how music and visual culture provided reciprocal somatic and symbolic cues within the domestic sphere. Using Richard Haydock’s Tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge (1598), it considers how the Orpheus trope, cogitated and embodied through visual and musical media, could be used to produced ‘fellow feeling’ and affect through ‘motion’. ‘Motion’ was not only fundamental to early modern theories of affective communication but was thought to provide the spark of life that aided interpersonal connection. This research explores the shared language between the theoretical and affective aspects of music and art in early modern England, stemming from classical sources on decorum and persuasive oration, to provide a more nuanced understanding of contemporary experiences of recreational music-making. I argue that the embodied and visual contributions of the performers are crucial to understanding Byrd’s song, as early modern approaches to motion and affect relied upon the body and voice, and were best communicated through sight and sound.

Echo’s Fluid (Im)materiality across Text and Performance

This article explores the use of echoes in early modern theater, particularly in the context of opera. By examining the incorporation of echoes in plays, libretti, and scores, the article argues that the Ovidian trope of Echo occupies a fluid space spanning textuality and performance. The article begins by delving into how the sonic essence of Echo was conveyed in early modern dramatic texts and conceptualized in coeval theoretical writings, forming a continual negotiation between the specific features of the performance and the endeavor to record it on the page. Subsequently, it looks at the appearance of Echo in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, offering it as a case study for evaluation through the lens of modern performances and the interpretive questions they raise.

Wet land’s past futures

This article introduces the conceptual framework of the volume Wetland. Shaping environments in Netherlandish art and presents a brief state of research. Using three examples – the loss of woodlands and its impact on painting, Dutch hydrological technology in the service of the colonization of Brazil, and the surge of a new Land art in the Netherlands in the face of climate change – the authors highlight the contemporaneity of early modern representations of Netherlandish landscapes against the background of ecological crisis.

Political Development and Political Thought

This essay applies existing research in new institutional economics to early modern European political theory so as to offer an interpretive proposal. Using Hobbes, Hume, and James Madison as examples, the essay proposes that understanding early modern European political theorists as inhabitants of developing countries (in a particular sense of that term) can benefit contemporary readers in interpreting some of these theorists’ normative prescriptions. Early modern political theorists faced significant risk of large-scale violence, political instability, and state repression in polities that still struggled to accomplish goals such as implementing rule of law, protecting property rights, and widely distributing material resources using impartial criteria. By contrast, many contemporary readers of these writers live in the developed and liberal-democratic West. Contemporary readers are thus liable to normalize their own conditions and to underestimate the political-economic constraints under which early modern political theorists wrote, thereby misreading some of the latter’s normative prescriptions. By interpreting early modern political theorists as writers who faced institutional constraints that have significantly receded in today’s West, contemporary readers can enrich their understanding of these writers’ objectives.

The life of matter: early modern vital matter theories introduction

The life of matter: early modern vital matter theories introduction