Early Modern Stage Research Articles

Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance ed. by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance ed. by Farah Karim-Cooper and Tiffany Stern Joe Falocco Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance. Edited by Karim-Cooper, Farah and Stern, Tiffany. London and New York: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013. Cloth $85.00, Paper $34.95, eBook $27.99. 296 pages. Now available in paperback, Shakespeare’s Theatres and the Effects of Performance provides a wealth of information about early modern staging practices. While this volume is dedicated to “the materiality of the playhouses” (2), it is not antitextual. Rather, the essays in the collection explore “the way physical and sensual theatre contributed to textual theatre” (1). This is a wise choice because, as contributor Paul Menzer notes, “Everything we know about Shakespeare and his age is preconceived by print” (141). Since so much evidence for the theatrical practices of this era derives from the extant playscripts, it would be impossible (even if it were desirable) to ignore this literary record. Even Menzer’s essay, which strives to peer through what Fredson Bowers called “the veil of print” in order to discern the manuscript form in which early modern actors received their parts, depends for a key piece of evidence on the 1615 Quarto of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (151-56). The strength of this volume is its ability to expand our appreciation of these literary texts—and to allow us to envisage their proper performance—by connecting them to the material circumstances that attended and inspired their composition. The editors’ own contributions are perhaps the best examples of this approach. Tiffany Stern’s essay, “‘This Wide and Universal Theatre’: the Theatre as Prop in Shakespeare’s Metadrama,” urges a reconsideration of what we now call “metatheatre.” She notes, “Shakespeare, writing for a non-illusionistic stage, would hardly surprise spectators by telling them that they were in a theatre” (14). Instead Sterm points to specific references to discrete attributes of playhouse architecture, such as Hamlet’s dramatic description of the “heavens” that covered the Globe stage as a “majestical roof fretted with golden fire” (2.2.302-03), to show how “the early modern playhouse seems to have repeatedly been used as a way of interpreting and heightening the words and, sometimes, as a way of querying or undercutting them” (Karim-Cooper and Stern 31). Similarly, Farah Karim-Cooper examines how early modern perception of “the sense of touch not as active but as receptive” enabled “the interior effects of theatrical performance [to be] imagined in tactile terms” (227, 230). Karim-Cooper’s schema describes both reception by early modern playgoers—who were normally “jostled, shoved and pressed in with roughly 2,999 others”—and also the way some onstage characters affected their fellow dramatic personages (218): “Thus Iago’s effectiveness in driving Othello mad with jealousy is imagined as tactile. Iago touches, rubs, scratches, pulls, pushes, pours with words and the play stages the terrible effects of his tactile strategy” (231). Some of the other essays are as strong as those of Stern and Karim-Cooper. Holly Dugan’s contribution, subtitled “The Smell of the Hope Theatre,” is [End Page 173] particularly delightful, especially for those old enough to cherish the cinematic fad of “smell-o-vision.” Similarly, Gwilym Jones’s description of how early modern practitioners used a “device . . . similar to a modern firework rocket” to produce storm effects at public amphitheaters makes one wonder how much these outdoor performances resembled today’s theme park stunt shows (35). Understandably, when such a scant historical record has been studied so extensively, contributors sometimes come to different conclusions about the same evidence. For instance, authors Lucy Munro and Andrea Stevens differ on the extent to which animal blood would have been used to represent its human equivalent on the early modern stage. Given the wealth of ongoing research in this field, it is also not surprising that a few observations from this volume, originally published in 2013, already seem outdated. Evelyn Tribble claims, for instance, that “Shakespeare’s players performed in the same ambient light as their audiences. This fact is widely recognized” (238). Martin White, however, made a convincing case that this was not...

The “Play-Boy,” the Female Performer, and the Art of Portraying a Lady

This essay asks how the boy players of the early modern English public stage and the aristocratic female performers of the early modern English court masque might have considered, and perhaps even affected, one another’s arts. The performances of both groups of performers were carefully calculated to achieve specific aesthetic, social, and political goals. Neither an aristocratic lady dancing in a masque nor a boy performing the role of such a lady on the public stage could have afforded to lose sight of the codes of elegant feminine behavior. Is it possible, then, that women’s and boys’ portrayals of elite femininity employed similar theatrical tactics? This essay proposes one methodology by which we might tease out potential relationships between boys’ and women’s performances. It begins by considering the conceptions of boy players and noble ladies inscribed in the texts of Ben Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609) and Love Restored (1612), comparing them to the scandalous behavior of Frances and Catherine Howard at the end of the latter masque’s performance. It goes on to suggest that these contexts may help us better to imagine how the boy who first played the eponymous heroine of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c.1612-13) portrayed her noble yet transgressive femininity. Such a comparison between the verbal and physical rhetoric of masques and those of public theater dramas may allow us to glimpse shared codes of class and gender embodiment across a range of performance cultures.

Forest protection and economic development by offshoring wood extraction: Bhutan’s clean development path

With globalization, virtual exchanges of natural resources embodied in traded commodities redistribute geographically land use and its environmental impacts. Benefits of national forest protection may be undermined at the global-scale by leakage through international trade. We studied land use displacement associated with national policies to protect forests in Bhutan. This case study provides a simple situation: a dominant forest cover almost unaffected by agricultural expansion, a rural economy dominated by the primary sector, centralized forest conservation policies, and a dominant trading partner. We assessed the net effects at the international level of the Bhutanese forest protection policies by accounting for trade in wood products with India. Our results show that these policies have been effective in maintaining a high forest cover, but have been accompanied by an increasing displacement of forest use to India. In 1996–2011, the difference between the total volume of wood imported from India and the total volume exported from Bhutan—i.e., the net displacement—corresponds to 27 % of the total volume consumed in Bhutan. In 2011, 68 % of the total forest area required to produce the wood consumed in Bhutan was located in India. The wood imported by Bhutan was likely originating from tree plantations in the northeastern Indian states. Since Bhutan has few tree plantations and very valuable natural forests, the net international-level ecological impacts of this land use displacement is arguably positive. Most of the wood imports of Bhutan were wood charcoal for its emerging chemical industries. This case of displacement reflects functional upgrading in the value-chain rather than an externalization of consumption-based environmental costs. Through its government policies, Bhutan has managed to support its economic development while protecting its forests and leapfrogging the negative impacts on forests generally associated with the early stages of modernization.

The Performance of Divine Providence on the Early Modern Stage: Tumbling Canvases and History Plays

In early modern corrales de comedias , stage effects were quite common; they provided spectators with a visual display that enhanced their reception of the dramatic poetry. Until recently, however, scholars have focused mainly on the text of early modern plays, pursuing purely literary analyses instead of investigating the uses and possible meanings of these effects in performance. This study examines the cultural significance of one stage effect, the falling painting, in three history plays: Tirso de Molina’s La prudencia en la mujer , Diego Ximénez de Enciso’s La mayor hazaña de Carlos V , and La Baltasara , written by a team of three playwrights, Luis Vélez de Guevara, Antonio Coello, and Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla. In the first part of my study, I examine the dynamic role of this stage property that falls without human intervention to argue that the painting represents unseen forces and establishes an elaborate connection between art, history, and divinity. Finally, I find that the falling painting reinforces art’s moralizing and didactic function in a visual manner for audiences attending early modern corrales , and it also embodies the relationship between divine providence and early modern historiography. (CCO)

“Apparel oft proclaims the man”: Visualizing Hamlet on the Early Modern Stage

Hamlet is replete with references to visual culture. Apparel, cosmetics, color, and accoutrements appear in the dialogue and stage directions of virtually every scene in Shakespeare’s longest play. These references are significant, for they hint at the way Shakespeare’s original production was staged, seen, and understood in the early modern English theatre. Considering how Hamlet would have appeared on the Globe stage, this essay argues that the play establishes a strong, martial aesthetic with its opening scene. The Ghost, “Armed at point, exactly cap-à-pie,” represents the ideal of this aesthetic. Neither Claudius nor Hamlet visually fit this martial ideal, a fact which highlights each character’s shortcomings as a potential leader of the warlike state. Following the play’s visual logic, only Fortinbras, a nobleman who shows promise as a military leader, is ultimately the appropriate leader of Denmark. Dressed in the apparel of mourning, Hamlet would have been visually aligned with Horatio who almost certainly also wore black when Hamlet was first performed. Following common theatrical convention, Horatio would have appeared in the black academic gown of a scholar and been visually connected to the melancholy Dane on sight. In composing Hamlet for the stage, Shakespeare established a complex visual world that had consequences for how meaning was established and received in production.

Surpassing the King’s Two Bodies: The Politics Of Staging the Royal Effigy in Marlowe’s Edward II

In the final scene of Marlowe’s Edward II , young Edward III, newly crowned after his father’s deposition, teases audiences with the possibility that one of English history’s most famous funeral ceremonies is about to be re-enacted on the stage. In 1327, Edward II’s funeral ceremony was the first in English history to feature an effigy of the dead king on the royal hearse. In this essay, I speculate on the staging of this royal hearse in Marlowe’s play and explore the political implications of what might have been an actor performing the effigy on the early modern stage. By animating the royal effigy with an actor’s body, Marlowe’s play recalls the medieval political theory of the king’s two bodies. I propose in this essay that the specter of the staged royal effigy—a prosthetic body that literalizes the persona ficta of the dead king—in Marlowe’s history play engages this theory by undermining the force of sovereign authority fundamental to the concept of the king’s two bodies, supplementing sovereign authority with a prosthesis that is at the same time a reminder of sovereignty’s denuded force; in exploring the paradox of sovereign excess with the king’s royal hearse in Marlowe’s play, this essay makes the case that Edward II offers an immanent challenge to royal absolutism from within the body of the dead king.

The Appearance of Blacks on the Early Modern Stage: <i>Love’s Labour’s Lost</i>’s African Connections to Court

While scholarship is certain that white actors did appear in blackface on the Elizabethan stages, this paper argues for the additional possibility of actual moors and blacks appearing on stage in early modern London. Examining the positive social, political, and economic implications of using in performance these bodies perceived as exotic, I argue for the appearance of blacks in Love’s Labour’s Lost as a display of courtly power in its 1597-8 showing for Elizabeth I. Building on this precedent, Queen Anna’s staging of herself as black in the 1605 Masque of Blackness , I argue, worked to assert the new Jacobean court’s power.

Notes on Contributors

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreKimberly Huth is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She has published essays on Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and genre theory in Studies in Philology and Cahiers Elisabethains. Currently she is researching the representation of war veterans in Shakespeare’s vision of Rome.Thomas J. Moretti is assistant professor of English and editor of The Shakespeare Newsletter at Iona College. His current work focuses on the interplay between religion and gender in early modern English drama. His writings include essays on religious mediation in such plays as John Webster’s The White Devil and on the linkages between theater, hospitality, and time in King Lear. He received the Renascence journal’s Dr. Joseph M. Schwartz Memorial Prize for his essay on the tensions between gender ideology and Christian rule in Henry VI, Part 3.Jennifer Panek is associate professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Her publications include Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), a Norton Critical Edition of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, and recent articles in English Literary Renaissance and English Literary History on masculinity and male sexuality on the early modern stage. She is currently working on a book-length project on sexuality and shame in early modern drama.Chloe Preedy is a lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature at the University of Exeter (Penryn campus). This article extends her previous research into the “politic” appropriation of religious rhetoric for personal, political, or financial gain, as explored in her monograph Marlowe’s Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic (Arden, 2013). The article’s focus upon the question of how Ben Jonson conceived of and represented theatrical value in his comedies also anticipates her next book project, which investigates how early modern dramatists negotiated issues of theatrical authority within the open-air play-houses.Bradley D. Ryner is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University. His first book, Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing 1600–1642 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), examines the generative relationship between dramatic form and economic thought. He is also the coeditor, along with Darlene Farabee and Mark Netzloff, of Early Modern Drama in Performance: Essays in Honor of Lois Potter (University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). He is currently working on a monograph on questions of ontology and agency in early English drama. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 42, Number 2Fall 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/679457 © 2014 Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts, 2014

Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts, 2014 James Beekman Bush, Editor/Researcher (bio), Andrew Gibb, Associate Editor (bio), and Troy Matthew Lescher, Associate Editor (bio) This is the sixty-second annual report of dissertations in progress in theatre arts in the United States. The entries contained in this report were gathered from those institutions offering a doctoral degree in theatre or related fields. The accuracy of this report depends largely on the cooperation of those faculty members who submitted complete and timely information. By compiling this data, we seek to inform the greater theatre community of the diverse research projects currently underway across various universities and disciplines. This report lists (in order) the doctoral student’s name, dissertation title, institution, academic department, faculty supervisor, and projected year of completion. Dissertation topics are arranged in two parts: in part 1, topics are listed first geographically, and second by time periods; and part 2 provides additional divisions for those projects that are not easily classified within geographic or historical parameters, but conform to other emerging areas of contemporary research. A request for submissions for the 2015 edition will be mailed in October 2014. Please contact the 2014–15 editor (andrew.gibb@ttu.edu) if your institution is not already receiving the annual call for submissions. My associate editors and I are grateful for the effort of all those who have contributed to this annual report. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the Texas Tech University Department of Theatre and Dance and its chair, Mark Charney, for sponsoring this endeavor. [End Page 331] Part I Africa Williams, Joshua. Don’t Tell The Hyena How Well You Can Bite: Performance, Race, and Animality in Eastern Africa. University of California, Berkeley. Performance Studies. Catherine Cole. 2016. Brazil Porter, Laurelann. Performance and Social Justice for Women in Rural Bahia, Brazil. Arizona State University. Film, Dance, and Theatre. Amira de la Garza and Tamara Underiner. 2015. England Medieval Renaissance Chapman, Matthieu. The Other Other: Re-Constructing the Paradigm of Race in Early Modern England. University of California, San Diego. Theatre and Dance. Janet Smarr. 2014. Mendelson, Avi. Putting on Antic Dispositions: Shape-shifting Shakespearean Madnesses. Brandeis University. English. Thomas King. 2015. Pyles, Timothy. Performing Magic: Shakespeare, Magic, and Early Modern Skepticism. Indiana University. Theatre, Drama, and Dance. Amy Cook. 2014. Quinsland, Kirk. Interactive Performance and the Early Modern Stage. Fordham University. English. Mary Bly. 2014. Stark-Gendrano, Rebecca. Desunt Nonnulla: Reading the Fragment in Early Modern England. Fordham University. English. Mary Bly. 2014. Tompkins, J. Case. Methods of Revision in Sixteenth-Century English Cycle Drama. Purdue University. English. Charles Ross and Paul White. 2013. Windholz, Jordan. Men Alone: Representations of the Bachelor in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Fordham University. English. Heather Dubrow. 2015. Sixteenth/Seventeenth Century Hughes, Jacob A. Shakespeare’s Chaucerian Entertainers. Washington State University. English. William Hamlin. 2014. Restoration/Eighteenth Century Brano, Anthony. Acting Oblivion: The Politics of Memory, Forgetting, and Forgiveness on the Restoration Stage, 1660–1685. Fordham University. English. Stuart Sherman. 2015. Hendrickson, Kalissa. Affecting Objects; or, the Drama of Foreign Products in English Comedy, 1660–1800. Arizona State University. English. Mark Lussier and Ayanna Thompson. 2015. Pfeiffer, Loring. Bodies and Selves: Women Playwrights and Subjectivity on the Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Stage. University of Pittsburgh. English. Jennifer Waldron. 2015. Nineteenth Century Simon, Jessica. Mimetic Sensations: Sensation (Melo)Drama, the Sensation Novel, and Victorian Realism. Columbia University. English and Comparative Literature. Sharon Marcus. 2015. France Given, William. Early Illusionists, the Technology of Filmic Representation, and the Augmentation of Perceptions of Reality of the Performative Space during the Belle Époque in Paris. University of California, San Diego. Theatre and Dance. Jim Carmody. 2014. Germany Coen, Elizabeth. Staging Theater to Realize a Nation: The Development of German National Theater in the Eighteenth Century. University of Washington. Drama. Odai Johnson. 2015. Friedman, Andrew. Theatre of Contemporaneity: Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller, and Trond Reinholdtsen’s Ibsen-Saga. The Graduate Center/CUNY. Theatre. Marvin Carlson. 2016. Woolf, Brandon. Re-Functionary Stages: Cultural Policy and Contemporary Performance in Berlin. University of California, Berkeley. Performance Studies. Shannon Jackson. 2014. Ireland Cahill, Alex Iben. The Catholic Stage Guild of Ireland: Forming the Catholic...

“Something in me dangerous”: Hamlet, melancholy, and the early modern scholar

This essay situates Hamlet in the history of theatrical representations of melancholy. Traditionally, early modern stage melancholics were dramatically distanced from other characters on stage either by the isolating effects of their condition, or by the dramatic irony that made their lack of self-awareness ridiculous, as with the melancholy Jaques. Hamlet, uniquely, assigns dramatic control over this curious dramatic space to the melancholic himself. In exaggerating his melancholy, Hamlet manipulates stage conventions associated with melancholy to exploit this dramatic space as a protective form of privacy from authority, even in that authority's surveilling midst. This exaggerated version of “the scholar's disease” links Hamlet with the rebellious Earl of Essex, whom Francis Bacon counselled to “pretend to be as bookish and contemplative as ever you were” in order to disarm Elizabeth's growing distrust. Hamlet's metatheatrical representation of melancholy, and its relevance to Essex's rebellion, partakes in the collapse of melancholy's medical conception and the diffusion of its signification into literary, social and political realms. It also dramatizes how this concept's collapse and diffusion could be exploited by disaffected scholars as a means of concealing resistance to authority as apolitical disposition or disease.

Introduction

Introduction RORY LOUGHNANE, ANDREW J. POWER, AND PETER SILLITOE In late 1624 tides of change were sweeping across Europe. Louis XIII appointed Cardinal Richelieu as First Minister of France on 12 August of that year, the Siege of Breda represented a high-water mark for Spanish success in the Eighty Years’ War, and, as the health of James I declined, England faced up to the prospect of a new monarch for the first time in over two decades.1 The wider contexts for the adventoftheCarolineerainEnglishhistory—royalismandradicalism,cavalierism andparliamentarianism—hasinvitedanapproachtoliterarystudiesoftheperiod that is tied inextricably to the political and theological controversies, conflicts and crises of its day. The writing of the period itself was long treated as a type of stopgap , bridging the creative brilliance of the ‘golden age’ of English writing, from Spenser to Shakespeare to Donne, with the outbreak of civil war, the formation of the English Commonwealth, undone by the later Restoration, and the emergence of Milton, Davenant and Dryden. Thus the ‘first’ Caroline period of literature — more typically discussed as ending in 1642, such has been the predominance of critical writing on dramatic performance, but in fact ending with the execution of Charles I in 1649 — has suffered by negative comparison to what came before and what emerged later. But such a critical vantage point has come under increased attack in recent years as scholars have set out to understand and appreciate the literature of this period on its own merits and not only in the light of the literary successes of the earlier age or the bloody ruptures of the civil war to come.2 On James I’s final months, see Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the 1 First Monarch of a United Great Britain (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), pp. 330–50. Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 2 helped first instigate the revisionist charge. More recently, works such as Reid Barbour’s Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Thomas N. Corns’s collection The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and his monograph A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) have helped sustain it. As ever, much criticism has centred on drama in the period, and there have been several excellent revisionist studies of the period, including: Julie Sanders’s Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999) and The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer’s collection Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern Stage, 1625–1642 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Yearbook of English Studies, 44 (2014), 1–11© Modern Humanities Research Association 2014 We begin by attempting to situate our current enterprise within recent studies of the period. The present volume brings together fourteen established and emerging scholars of Caroline literature to assess and respond to recent critical approaches, while also shedding new light on overlooked texts, contexts and practices. We have requested that contributors ask new questions about the function, form and features of Caroline literature, shifting the critical question from ‘how is such writing distinct from what comes before?’ or, ‘how does it pre-empt the revolution to come?’ to ‘how might we approach this literature on its own terms?’ This is not to dismiss the political and theological turmoil of the period, or, indeed, to overlook the weighty sense of nostalgia for, and anxious engagement with, earlier writing that is pervasive in this period, but instead to search for new ways to approach an epoch of writing that remains (relatively) neglected in the English canon. The fruits of such an approach — from the identification of a new vogue for the ‘grotesque’ in contemporary poetry to a reconsideration of the evidence for the reputation of the Red Bull theatre and its repertory — attest to the varied ways by which we might revisit and revise opinions about Caroline literary activity. The volume is divided into three discrete sections — drama, poetry and other writing — but, as will become clear, each section...

Melting flesh, living words

This essay argues that the Book of Common Prayer offered new ways to think about the flesh in Reformation England. Whereas the medieval liturgy emphasized the physical vitalism of Christ’s body and blood, the Anglican liturgy defined ‘flesh’ in the context of an ecclesiastical community characterized by linguistic transparency and textual communion. To chart this movement from fleshly presence to spiritual mystery, I show how the rubrics, ornamentations and texts of both the medieval Mass books and the reformed Book of Common Prayer iterated contrasting conceptions of the flesh that emerged from traditional and reformed sacramental theologies. I conclude by showing how secular institutions, namely the anatomy theater and the early modern stage, pressured such a reformation of the flesh by making the physical materiality of flesh, blood and wounds the focus of their spectacles.

Jews of London: An Analysis on the Production and Consumption of Stage Jews

The essay attempts to explain the significance and effect of theatrical presence of Jews on the early modern English stage by discussing Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in particular. To understand theatrical presences of Jews, the essay discusses the absence of real or official Jews in the sixteenth century England, as a result of the early banishment of them from the land since 1290 under the reign of Edward I. The absence of real object rather produced unrealistically exaggerated and fantasized stereotypical images of Jewish people, readily adopted by contemporary playwrights as an emblem of evil and alien. Furthermore, the actual case of Dr. Lopez, a Marano physician, accused for attempting to poison the Queen in 1594, brought a synergic effect of the popularity of the plays as well as the execution of Dr. Lopez. To conclude what effects the Jew plays had on the Elizabethan audience, the essay discusses genre discourses around The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, often fluctuating between tragedy and comedy. Not conforming to conventional genre classifications, I suggest relocating the plays as a sheer entertainment corresponding to contemporary sports, wrestling, focusing on each play’s theatrical strength, competition like plotline between evil aliens, and finally pleasure provided although not necessarily siding with one. The fictional representation of Barabas and Shylock might have delivered pleasure to the audience by repetitive displays of their suffering, desperate struggle, proficient skills to revenge, and catastrophic defeat in the end. Stage Jews present a capable enemy worth fighting against and a notoriously powerful sports player that sells in early modern England.

“Youth is Drunke with Pleasure, and therefore Dead to all Goodnesse”: Regulating the Excess of the Erotic Early Modern Body

This article investigates the erotic and youthful body in John Fletcher’s play The Faithful Shepherdess, written for The Children of the Queen’s Revels c.1607. For many early modern scholastic, medical, and conduct manual writers, the life stage of Youth was a particularly dangerous moment in an individuals’ life, a time where the body was in a constant state of flux and ruled by unhealthy bodily excess. Fletcher’s play presents an assortment of characters who are all ruled by or obsessed with their own youthful passions. This article engages with Galenic humoral theory, an area that has been neglected in scholarship on Fletcher’s play, to provide a close analysis of Youth and erotic excess on the early modern stage.

Modernization is associated with intensive breastfeeding patterns in the Bolivian Amazon

For many traditional, non-industrialized populations, intensive and prolonged breastfeeding buffers infant health against poverty, poor sanitation, and limited health care. Due to novel influences on local economies, values, and beliefs, the traditional and largely beneficial breastfeeding patterns of such populations may be changing to the detriment of infant health. To assess if and why such changes are occurring in a traditional breastfeeding population, we document breastfeeding patterns in the Bolivian Tsimane, a forager-horticulturalist population in the early stages of modernization. Three predictions are developed and tested to evaluate the general hypothesis that modernizing influences encourage less intensive breastfeeding in the Tsimane: 1) Tsimane mothers in regions of higher infant mortality will practice more intensive BF; 2) Tsimane mothers who are located closer to a local market town will practice more intensive BF; and 3) Older Tsimane mothers will practice more intensive BF. Predictions were tested using a series of maternal interviews (from 2003 to 2011, n = 215) and observations of mother-infant dyads (from 2002 to 2007, n = 133). Tsimane breastfeeding patterns were generally intensive: 72% of mothers reported initiating BF within a few hours of birth, mean (±SD) age of CF introduction was 4.1 ± 2.0 months, and mean (±SD) weaning age was 19.2 ± 7.3 months. There was, however, intra-population variation in several dimensions of breastfeeding (initiation, frequency, duration, and complementary feeding). Contrary to our predictions, breastfeeding was most intensive in the most modernized Tsimane villages, and maternal age was not a significant predictor of breastfeeding patterns. Regional differences accounted for variation in most dimensions of breastfeeding (initiation, frequency, and complementary feeding). Future research should therefore identify constraints on breastfeeding in the less modernized Tsimane regions, and examine the formation of maternal beliefs regarding infant feeding.

Lichamelijkheid en emoties op het vroegmoderne podium - De martelaar als theatraal effect

This article examines physical representation of pain on the early modern stage, taking as its starting point the genre of martyr tragedy. It considers one tragedy, La Macchabée (1596) by Jean de Virey. Analysis of its dramaturgical structures and the modalities of representation of this specific genre suggest a double hypothesis: (1) martyr tragedy cannot be understood without taking into account its links with the medieval tradition of mystery plays and its broader cultural imagination, and (2) emotions and their bodily representations are historically defined categories functioning within a specific performative regime. By means of their spectacular simulation of embodied emotions plays such as La Macchabée mobilized an emotional repertoire both for actor and spectator.

Authorship and Shaw's Shakes Versus Shav

Authorship and Shaw's <i>Shakes Versus Shav</i>

Shakespeare and the Staging of English History by Janette Dillon (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Staging of English History by Janette Dillon Wai Fong Cheang (bio) Janette Dillon . Shakespeare and the Staging of English History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. 150. $75.00. In Shakespeare and the Staging of English History, Janette Dillon aims to reconstruct stage pictures on early modern stages for selected scenes from Shakespeare's history plays. The book begins with a discussion of the opening [End Page 262] stage direction of 1 Henry VI, reasoning how an important stage property, the coffin, is borne and adorned, in what order each attendant enters, what position on the stage each character occupies, and what kind of atmosphere as a whole is created onstage. By focusing primarily on the logic of spatial allotment of both stage properties and characters, Dillon's approach to Shakespeare's history plays reflects the perspective of a professor of drama, who envisions the plays in detailed stage performances. One of the most intriguing features of the book is Dillon's claim that it centers on "the nature and meaning of performance on early modern stages" (5). Our knowledge about the actual productions of Shakespeare plays in the Renaissance is very limited because unlike written texts that may survive over time, stage productions are ephemeral without modern filming devices. Dillon mentions the existence of evidence such as "inventories of costumes and props and occasional eyewitness testimony" (1), and this circumstantial evidence has inspired her discussion. However, the main parts of her reinterpretations are still based on clues from stage directions and lines from characters within the plays. Dillon makes an apology on the very first page of the introduction by informing us that "words like 'probably' will figure frequently" (1). This apology may be considered a self-evident drawback by some critics. I have in mind the word "conjectured" that E. K. Chambers uses in his criticism of Edmond Malone's description of the sign of the Globe, and Chambers's skeptical comment, "I do not know where he got this information."1 However, just like all defenses of poetry since Aristotle, which shield the imaginary and the fictitious, Dillon's apology can be considered justifiable. She explains, at least, how she has inferred her probable stage pictures. Since even the authorship of the plays attributed to Shakespeare has long been a subject of contention, conjectures about original Shakespearean staging practices are naturally difficult and debatable. A basic premise of the book is that space onstage parallels social relationships, not just for early modern actors but also for early modern audiences. Dillon writes that "early modern actors and audiences had a strong shared sense of 'right' and 'wrong' about position and movement in social space and were inured to the idea that spatial and kinetic practice encoded certain aspects of social relationship" (7). She adds a note here that on spatial codes in the early modern period, we can refer to her earlier study The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400-1625 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Nevertheless, since the premise is critical to the whole book, it requires more elaboration than this note and the two brief examples she gives subsequently—the everyday practice of children kneeling to their fathers and women sitting on the left of men (7). Actually, not only the stage but also the whole theater, with its differently priced seating and spaces (groundlings did not have seats), was encoded with meanings of social relationship. Even though Dillon pays very little attention to the immediate spatial context of the stage, from critics such as Andrew Gurr, [End Page 263] a major academic advisor to the reconstruction of the Globe in London, we learn about the spatial arrangement of the theater in the form of a circle around the stage. Gurr brings attention to the significance of this circular notion of theatrical space at the beginning of Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, where he points out that "Shakespearean playgoers were members of a crowd surrounding the speakers," and there were even some seats behind the stage indicating the occupants' "social eminence."2 This important fact about the existence of different viewing angles is only mentioned in parentheses, where Dillon uses the...

The Roaring Boy: Contested Masculinity on the Early Modern Stage

The satirical representation of the roaring boy shows how men of a variety of social stations aped the belligerent, courtly, military styles of the upper class. And this stock figure highlights how the demimonde of early modern London, a site where social class is harder to determine with precision, was represented on stage.

Community, Credit, and the Prodigal Husband on the Early Modern Stage

Three early seventeenth-century “prodigal husband” comedies-- The Wise-woman of Hogsdon (Thomas Heywood, c.1604), How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad (anonymous, c. 1600–1602), and The London Prodigal (anonymous, c. 1603–1604)--reveal how the gendered nature of credit relations in early modern England and the concomitant community surveillance of the household head could cause a newly-married young man to experience his new position of patriarchal authority as loss of autonomy, and to desire nothing so much as escape.