Margreta De Grazia Research Articles

Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England

Contents: Introduction, Douglas A. Brooks. Part I Reproductive Rhetorics: Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg, and Descartes, Margreta de Grazia Meaning, 'seeing', printing, Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson. Part II Ink and Kin: A womb of his own: male Renaissance poets in the female body, Katharine Eisaman Maus Ben Jonson's branded thumb and the imprint of textual paternity, Lynne Dickson Bruckner All father: Ben Jonson and the psychodynamics of authorship, David Lee Miller. Part III Issues of the Book Trade: The bastard art: woodcut illustration in 16th-century England, James A. Knapp Promiscuous textualities: the Nashe-Harvey controversy and the unnatural productions of print, Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast The birth of advertising, Michael Baird Saenger Printing bastards: monstrous birth broadsides in early modern England, Aaron W. Kitch 'Red Incke': reading the bleeding on the early modern page, Bianca F.C. Calabresi. Part IV Parental Authorities: Marginal maternity: reading Lady Anne Clifford's A Mirror for Magistrates, Stephen Orgel Checking the father: anxious paternity and Jacobean press censorship, Cyndia Susan Clegg Pater patriae: James I and the imprint of prerogative, Howard Marchitello. Part V Textual Legacies: How many children had Alice Walker?, Laurie E. Maguire Mothers and authors: Johnson v. Calvert and the new children of our imagination, Mark Rose In locus parentis, Judith Roof. Afterword, Jennifer Wynne Hellwarth Bibliography Index.

Staged Properties in Early Modern Drama (review)

Reviews451 Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, eds. Staged Properties in EarlyModern Drama, . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 358. $75.00 casebound. This fascinatinganthologyrepresents the confluence oftwo developments,one acknowledged, the other implicit, but still a significant "shaping presence" in the essays.The first is the interest in things rather than people.Inthe 1980s and 1990s, in reaction to the earlier glorification of the "Renaissance Man," early modern studies turned the subject into a problem, producing a series offascinating books and articles on the construction ofsubjectivity and interiority in Elizabethan and Stuart England (for example, Elizabeth Hansons fascinating Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]). Before long, however, the study of subjects started to be complemented by its inverse partner: the study of objects, things, material cultural.As the editors ofSubjectandObjectin Renaissance Culture(Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, eds. [Cambridge: Carmbridge University Press, 1996]) put it in the introduction to their seminal anthology, "The purpose of this collection of essays is not to efface the subject but to offset it by insisting that the object be taken into account" (5). Harris and Korda explicitlysituatetheircollectionin thisvein ofcriticism.Theynotewith approval how early modern scholarship has become"obsessed with materiality," and consequently, how "theatrical objects have increasinglyjoined subjects as privileged sites of materialist inquiry" (15). They cite as their forbears such notable critical works as Douglas Bruster's Drama and theMarketin theAge of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992), Subject and Object, and Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt's anthology, Renaissance Culture and theEveryday(Philadelphia: UniversityofPennsylvania Press, 1999).1 They are also interdisciplinary, as they draw on the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, whose anthology, The SocialLife ofThings: Commoditiesin CulturalPerspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1986) may be called the tutelary spirit of Staged Properties. The second major influence arises from the unhappiness ofhistorians with a good deal of the work that goes under the rubric of"New Historicism." In short, many charged that New Historicism is but bad history writ large.2 Stung by the validityofthis assessment (and perhaps a bit tired with the predictability of many New Historicist readings), several key literary critics reacted by promising to do better by the archives while keeping the insights afforded by literary theory. David Scott Kastan, for example, in his essay "Shakespeare After Theory," called for "a set of interests and procedures more rigorously historical than recent theory-driven studies have been, but that, unlike the old literary history, takes to heart (and mind) the implications of the theoretical 452Comparative Drama movements ofthe last twenty years."3 One result ofthis development has been the new interest in how the seeminglymundane details ofbook production can yield productive insights into the relationships between text and culture.4 The topic and the essays in Staged Properties constitute another result in three ways. First,all ofthese essays are deeply, richlyhistorical.Nobody can say that the contributors have not done their homework. Second, while a number of the contributors engage in a "qualitative analysis of the stuff of material culture" (16), that is, looking at how stage props reflect in complex ways early modern culture, four (Douglas Bruster, Lena Cowen Orlin, Peter Stallybrass, and Natasha Korda) review archival documents of stage history "through a recognizably quantitative lens" (17). Striving for greater authority, these critics turn to statistical analysis, something one rarely sees in literary studies. Finally, while the contributors to Staged Properties are obviously interested in the relations between stage and society,they avoid the tendentious politics (people good, authority bad) that sometimes mars New Historical work. The editors describe the "dominant methodological strain" of New Historicism as seeking "to disclose the contours and faultlines of cultural formations through nuanced accounts ofsynecdochic microdetail" (16),which is rather different from the calls for revolution one sometimes reads. The exploration of early modern stage properties, however, is necessarily burdened by the paucity ofprimarysources. In fact,the amount ofevidence for what props appeared on the stage is amazingly small. Philip Henslowe recorded an "enventary [inventory] of all the properties for my Lord Admeralles men, the 10 ofMarche 1598" (the original is lost),that lists only thirty-five items, and is reproduced in the appendix of Staged Properties. Other...

Materialism and Reification in Renaissance Studies

and Reification in Renaissance Studies JONATHAN GIL HARRIS and NATASHA KORDA eds., Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 358 pp. $70.00VALENTINE GROEBNER, Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts:Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Pamela E. SelwynPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 248 pp. $49.95NATASHA KORDA, Shakespeare's Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern EnglandPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 276 pp. $49.95VICTORIA SILVER, Imperfect Sense: Predicament of Milton's IronyPrinceton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 409 pp. $60.00CERI SULLIVAN, Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern WritingLondon: Associated University Presses, 2002. 217pp. $42.50The relationship between the and literary representation has always been a source of theoretical controversy. In the twentieth century, those critics most interested in the question usually defined themselves as materialists, and argued that the economic mode of production in some sense determines aesthetic modes of representation. novel, for example, might express or reflect the rise to economic and political prominence of the bourgeoisie. But such an can be called only on the supposition that the is a material phenomenon. When it becomes clear that large elements of the economy itself take the form of representation, economic determinism ceases to be materialist. What is more, in a development unremarked by most literary critics, over the last two decades both economic determinism and have shed their wonted associations with the political Left.Today, the application of microeconomics to the human sciences as practiced by such thinkers as Gary Becker, and the ultra-materialist approach to subjectivity advocated by the followers of Richard Dawkins, are abetted by allegedly radical theorists such as Donna Haraway and Judith Butler, whose insistence on the materiality of the human subject chimes perfectly with market ideology. cumulative effect has been to establish an orthodoxy that is materialist in a wider, deeper sense than the Leftist of the last century. Not only does the determine our ideas; ideas themselves are material, neurological, and chemical reactions in the brain. Not only are the actions of human beings driven by material factors; human beings are themselves material, performative, desiring machines.Literary and cultural critics now tend to gloss over the pseudo-Marxist heritage of the word materialism, but this has not weakened their fidelity to the concept. overwhelming orthodoxy continues to assume that matter is the only reality, and that the realm of ideas is a vaguely pernicious delusion. Materialism is still sometimes used as a more or less open substitute for Marxism-for example Natasha Korda's discussion of Heidi Hartmann's 1981 essay The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism concludes by advocating a compromise method that utilizes both materialist and feminist modes of analysis (38, emphases added). One explanation for the adulatory references to materialism in early modern cultural studies is that it provides a useful cipher for critics who may be squeamish about identifying themselves with the other, less fashionable, M-word.But something else is happening to the term materialism, something peculiar, portentous, and profoundly expressive of the spirit of our age. Early modern cultural studies seem to be developing an ethical and political commitment to things, and that is what materialism is coming to mean in this context. One of the most lucid expositions of this kind of is the introduction to the 1996 collection of essays entitled Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, edited by Margreta de Grazia, Peter Stallybrass, and Maureen Quilligan. …

Hamlet before Its Time

Margreta de Grazia is Clara M. Clendenen Term Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author of Shakespeare Verbatim(1991) and has edited, with Stanley Wells, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2001). Her book Unmodernizing Shakespeare is forthcoming.

Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Evidence ed. by Edward Pechter

order emblemized in Dame Nature and his audience’s identification with its principles” (194). “As poet Spenser is also rhetor and his images are, precisely, elements of argument” (196), but some arguments are presented in order to be refuted or qualified. Perhaps unavoidably a rhetorical approach makes for uninviting language, perceivable as jargon. Dixon claims he has tried to minimize the number and obscurity of unfamiliar terms (9-10), and in an appendix he provides a “Schematic of Classical Rhetoric and Glossary of Terms.” Words like “inventio ” and “topos” appearing on every page are a constant and perhaps necessary reminder that Spenser employs a rhetoric no longer current. But such language can become tiresome, and the reader may long for the vig­ orous plain English or even wit of which Dixon is also capable. I enjoy reading that Spenser’s steps of recapitulation “cobble the narrative road to Arlo Hill” (45) or that, “with the Proem to Book v, those ‘histories’ become history” (96), but a forbidding sentence like the following is more typical: “Marriage, so transfigured, becomes an ultimate term whose courtship re­ solves erotic estrangement in a social institution within which the courtier and courted exhibit, by a reciprocal procreative equilibrium of commitment without coercion, essential topoi of both chastity and justice” (89). This is a book Spenser scholars will have to take into account. Dixon’s rhetorical study not only fills a gap in the scholarship but provides a different and significant reading of The Faerie Queene as a whole poem focussing on justice. d a n i e l w . d o e r k s e n / University of New Brunswick Edward Pechter, ed., Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare: Questions of Ev­ idence (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996). viii, 266. $35.00 (U.S.) cloth. This strong and strongly unified collection of essays began to take shape “in the course of a year-long colloquium on the topic ‘Shakespeare in Per­ formance: The Nature of Evidence’ sponsored by the McGill University Shakespeare in the Theatre Research Group” (viii). Pride of place in the collection goes to Michael D. Bristol’s “How Good Does Evidence Have to Be?” — an essay that ambitiously opens the question of evidence with a broad and, to me, quite fascinating survey of theory of evidence subti­ tled “Veridical Evidence, Circumstantial Evidence, and Wishful Thinking.” But Bristol’s contribution narrows in its conclusion, becoming a critique of Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass’s “The Materiality of the Shake­ spearean Text” (Shakespeare Quarterly 44 [1993]: 255-84) that, to my mind, 189 somewhat perversely finds fault with their failure to construct a general hy­ pothesis concerning the production of early modern English drama when their stated purpose was, instead, to deconstruct the textual categories of word, work, character, and author. Following Bristol’s is another essay of impressive range: Alan C. Dessen’s “Recovering Elizabethan Staging: A Reconsideration of the Evidence.” Draw­ ing upon his nearly encyclopedic knowledge of stage directions in printed and manuscript drama, Dessen is able to clarify enigmatic directions from familiar works — like “Enter Marcus from hunting” in Shakespeare’s Ti­ tus Andronicus — by juxtaposing them to more informative directions from seldom-read plays — like 1 1 [Enter] Andrugio, as out of the wooddes, with Bowe and Arrowes, and a Cony at his gyrdle” from Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra. While Dessen is cautious when he points out that ninety per cent of the evidence we need to reconstruct “Elizabethan” staging is for­ ever gone, he is less cautious in asserting that there are only sixteen extant manuscripts with theatrical annotations (45) — there are more; or when he reads the position of stage directions in printed texts in an overly literal fashion — printers put stage directions where they fit on the page; or when he attributes to playwrights stage directions that may have been created by the many other agents involved in the production of drama. After Bristol’s and Dessen’s wide-ranging essays, the other chapters ad­ dress more restricted topics. In Shakespeare’s adaptation of the Vice figure from earlier drama to become the titular character in Richard III, Robert Weimann finds “evidence” for...

:Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

Introduction Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass Part I. Priority of Objects: 1. The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece Margreta de Grazia 2. Rude mechanicals Patricia Parker 3. Spenser's domestic domain: poetry property and the Early Modern subject Louis A. Montrose Part II. Materialisations: 4. Gendering the Crown Stephen Orgel 5. The unauthored 1539 volume in which is printed the Hecatomphile, The Flowers of French Poetry and Other Soothing Things Nancy J. Vickers 6. Dematerialisations: textile and textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser Ann Rosalind Jones Part III. Appropriations: 7. Freedom service and the trade in slaves: the problem of labour in Paradise Lost Maureen Quilligan 8. Feathers and flies: Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica Margaret W. Ferguson 9. Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a postcolonial history) Gary Tomlinson Part IV. Fetishisms: 10. Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage Peter Stallybrass 11. The Countess of Pembroke's literal translation Jonathan Goldberg 12. Remnants of the sacred in early modern England Stephen Greenblatt Part V. Objections: 13. The insincerity of women Marjorie Garber 14. Desire is death Jonathan Dollimore Index.

(Re)Thinking Unthinkable Thoughts

(Re)Thinking Unthinkable Thoughts Richard Levin (bio) Seven years ago in these pages I interrogated the recent discoveries made by a number of New Historicist, feminist, and cultural materialist critics that people in Renaissance (now early modern) England were unable to think of five ideas widely held today—that dramatic characters could serve as foils, that the drama could be illusionist and empathetic, that there was a category of valued writing which we now call “literature,” that there was a biological basis for gender division, and that humans possessed a self or identity persisting through time and change. 1 I presented evidence to show that each of these “unthinkable” ideas was in fact thought during this period, and I am happy to report that soon after the article appeared several of my arguments were endorsed by Lee Patterson and David Aers, and I also learned that two years earlier one of them had been anticipated by Natalie Zemon Davis. 2 I cannot report, however, that the objections of Patterson, Aers, Davis, and myself have had any discernible effect on the unthinkability enterprise: none of the critics we criticized, so far as I know, has modified his or her views and more discoveries of this kind keep cropping up. I want to move on, then, from a description of the enterprise, which is all I attempted in my earlier article, to propose some explanations for it, but before doing so I will list a few of the additional discoveries that have been announced, or have come to my attention, since I wrote the article, and to correct the impression that they are limited to the Renaissance, I am including two from other periods. Linda Charnes claims that “in early modern England, Love with a capital L” (which she defines as the idea of a love the “transcends” any “specific material, political, and social conditions”) “would not have been thinkable”; but she goes on to say that Antony and Cleopatra “examines the implications” of transcendent love and “subversively insists on” questioning it, 3 so Shakespeare and his audience had to think of this unthinkable idea. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass claim that “neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality existed as categories in early modern Europe” because “the latter-day incontrovertible male/female binary . . . was not yet in place”; and Alan Sinfield says that in this period [End Page 525] homosexual relations “were rarely apprehended as sodomy—precisely because that was so unthinkable.” 4 But the laws against sodomy (under which people were apprehended and convicted) prove it was thinkable, and so does the well-known passage in Leviticus 20:13, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination” (King James Version), which defines heterosexuality and homosexuality as distinct categories, based on an incontrovertible male/female binary. James Kavanagh claims that our idea of “dramatic structure” was “unutterable” and “unimaginable” in the Renaissance because it is “invested . . . with two hundred years of a discourse on the literary and the aesthetic whose most basic terms could not be uttered until two hundred years after Shakespeare wrote.” 5 But Ben Jonson discusses this unimaginable dramatic structure in the final section of Timber, or Discoveries, and so does Aristotle in the Poetics which was written more than 2,000 years before the term could be uttered. Karen Newman claims that “by the time of Rymer’s attack on Othello [in A Short View of Tragedy, 1693], Shakespeare’s heroic and tragic representation of a black man seemed unthinkable”; but on the preceding page she quotes from Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko, which was written a few years before Rymer’s book and presents a heroic and tragic black man, 6 as does Thomas Southerne’s popular tragedy with the same title, produced in 1695. We also know that Othello was frequently performed in London at this time (in versions close to Shakespeare’s text), and so can infer that many people in the audiences were able not only to think of this unthinkable thought but also to approve of it. Terry Eagleton claims that the modern failure “to see eye to eye on all the...

The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth.

Introduction, Jean I. Marsden accents yet unknown - canonization and the claiming of Julius Caesar, Michael Dobson the restoration of King Lear, Nancy Klein Maguire rewritten women - Shakespearean heroines in the Restoration, Jean I. Marsden Shakespeare in quotation marks, Margreta de Grazia Kemble, Scott and the mantle of the Bard, Nicola Watson caught in the act - or, the prosing of Juliet, John Glavin disintegration and its reverberations, Hugh Grady Bardolotry then and now, Howard Felperin the transvestite's progress - Rosalind the Yeshiva boy, Marjorie Garber Buzz Goodbody - directing for change, Dympna Callaghan Shakespearean features, Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey Cymbeline's other endings, Ann Thompson.

ABSTRACTS

Margreta de Grazia. “The Areopagitica's ‘Gross Conforming Stupidity.’”Lars Engle. “Is Eve What God Gives or What Adam Asks For?”Cheryl H. Fresch. “Adam's Request for Eve: Comedic Form and Function in Paradise Lost.”Phillip J. Gallagher. “Spenser and Milton: The Promethean Connection.”Thomas M. Greene. “The Meeting Soul in Milton's Companion Poems.”Christopher Grose. “Milton's Apology and the ‘Various Quills’ of Lycidas.”Marshall Grossman. “Augustine, Spenser, Milton and the Christian Ego.”Elizabeth K. Hill. “Alcestis at Ludlow.”Thomas Kranidas. “Blind Mouths: Preaching, Politics, and Poetry.”Thomas Kranidas. “Polarity and Structure in Milton's Areopagitica.”Edward Le Comte. “Miltonic Echoes in Elegia VII.”William Alexander McClung. “Literary and Universal Architecture: The Architectonics of Paradise Lost.”Diane McColley. “Subsequent or Precedent? Eve as Milton's Defense of Poesie.”John Mulryan. “The Virtuous and the Effeminate Herakles in Spenser and Milton.”Mary Nyquist. “Reading the Fall: Discourse and Drama in Paradise Lost.”Gordon Teskey. “Milton's Choice of Subject and Renaissance Critical Theory.”Edward W. Tayler. “Milton's Sage and Serious Poet.”Joseph Wittreich. “Biblical Narrative and the Art of Samson Agonistes.”

Shakespeare and Language

Journal Article The Literary Language of Shakespeare (by S. S. Hussey); Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction (by N. F. Blake) Get access Shakespeare and LanguageThe Literary Language of Shakespeare. By S. S. Hussey. New York: Longman, 1982. Pp. x + 214. $9.95.Shakespeare’s Language: An Introduction. By N. F. Blake. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Pp. x + 154. $19.95. Margreta De Grazia Margreta De Grazia 1Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 4, Winter 1985, Pages 507–509, https://doi.org/10.2307/2870325 Published: 01 December 1985