Relationship Of Play Research Articles

The Anxiety of <i>Auctoritas</i>: Chaucer and <i>The Two Noble Kinsmen</i>

This essay reads Fletcher and Shakespeare's final collaboration, a dramatic adaptation of The Knight's Tale , as an anxious engagement with the Renaissance's understanding of Chaucer as a vernacular auctor , with that word's imbricated senses of authorship, authority, and paternity. From his earliest encomiasts to the late sixteenth century, Chaucer was figured as the father of English literature, a tradition culminating in Thomas Speght's extravagant folio edition of the Workes (1598). Unlike other early modern dramatic adaptations of Chaucerian texts, The Two Noble Kinsmen explicitly names and praises its canonical source. However, the play's relationship with its auctor is at once reverential and confrontational, as the text thematizes its struggle to create art from a venerable literary monument. Allegorizing the treatment of auctoritas throughout the play, Fletcher and Shakespeare find spaces for resistance to authority and imaginative invention within structures of containment at a time when dramatic writing was grappling with its own relationship to the literary.

Oaths, Threats and Henry V

Why is Shakespeare's Irish captain, MacMorris, so full of angry oaths? Why does the valiant Fluellen profanely swear ‘By Cheshu’? To address these questions is to be led through early modern accounts of swearing into the binding language of Henry V, with its dramatic potential not just to secure through speech acts but to mislead, evade and threaten. This article puts the play's preoccupation with oaths into context, both in relation to such plays as Edward III and Richard II and more largely in connection with sixteenth-century attitudes to gages, pledges, ransom and earnest. It pursues binding words not just through the main, historical action but through the King Henry and Williams plot, and the related comic sequence that leads to Fluellen beating Pistol. Overarching the discussion is a reappraisal of the play's relationship with the Elizabethan wars in Ireland. Analogues of MacMorris are found in Sir Henry Sidney's Memoir and the State Papers, while Sir Francis Bacon's observations about the oaths and vows of princes are used to illuminate the unresolved outcome of the play's high-political drama.

Penthesileas Versprechen: Exemplarische Studien über die literarische Referenz. (Reihe Litterae, 162) by Rüdiger Campe

n8o Reviews to recent biographical work might have been preferable to conjecture. It will be interesting to see how the editors deal with the very much more challenging task of contextualizing letters from the author's maturer years. What we have for themoment is a gallon in a pint pot that leaves the reader thirsting formore. University of Kent Osman Durrani Penthesileas Versprechen: Exemplarische Studien uber die literarische Referenz. Ed. by Rudiger Campe. (Reihe Litterae, 162) Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach. 2008. 378 pp. 44. ISBN 978-3-7930-9536-1. Sceptics might wonder why a volume of essays on Kleist's play Penthesilea is needed, given the extraordinary amount of secondary literature on Kleist generally and on thisplay inparticular. In his introduction, Rudiger Campe remarks that the impetus for thevolume originated from theperception thatmost studies of theplay from the last twenty-fiveyears were limited by their adherence to one of two 'falsche Alternativen' (p. 9): either an 'intensiv' close reading of the play, or an extensiv' reading drawing links to its cultural context. This seems a curious argument, given that,while most critics necessarily place greater emphasis on one approach than the other, there aremany excellent studies that combine both approaches successfully. None the less, thisvolume contains much that isvaluable. Its chief strength is that itoffersa series of thoughtful?though sometimes recondite?essays that illuminate a number of challenging aspects of theplay. It isnot possible todeal with all thirteen essays here, but a selective surveywill review some noteworthy contributions. One group of essays deals with the language of the play. Carol Jacobs's contribution, a German rendering ofmaterial from hermonograph Uncontainable Romanticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), argues that the play presents a confrontation between literal and figurative language. Marianne Schuller shows how metaphors of light are used to such excess in theplay that language loses itspower of reference, a theme developed byGerhard Neumann. Neumann shows how images take on a lifeof their own in the play, and suggests thatKleist creates a 'Theater,welches das Brechen der Reprasentationskraft der Sprache, das Versagen ihrerReferenz, in Szene setzt' (p. 122). A number of essays consider the play's aesthetic qualities. Helmut Schneider addresses the play's relationship toWeimar classicism, arguing convincingly that it negates the possibility of a geschlossenen Buhnenillusion' (p. 131) or of a Vergeistigenden Ausgleich' (p. 145). Less well supported is Schneider's contention that Penthesilea kills Achilles for betraying her in her search for an independent identity.Noting affinitiesbetween the reception ofPenthesilea and the eighteenth century reception of Shakespeare inGermany, Bianca Theisen argues that Kleist enacts the return of a previously excluded grotesque corporeality to the theatre. Bernhard Greiner reads Penthesilea as a contribution to eighteenth-century debates on aesthetics. Greiner reviews the treatment of the sublime inKant and Schiller, and suggests that the heroine's rejection ofAchilles' offerof amock combat represents the refusal of Spiel. Moreover, Greiner interprets Penthesileas processing of her MLR, 105.4, 2010 1181 killing as an erhabene Wende' (p. 201). While Greiner's reading operates at a high level of abstraction and assumes a systematic understanding of idealist philosophy on Kleist's part, it is a suggestive and powerful contribution to the understanding of the play, not least because ithelps to explain certain obscure turns of phrase. A number of other essays view the play in the context of discourses of gender, sexuality, and politics. In her contribution, Katrin Pahl criticizes the assumption that Achilles and Penthesilea embody normative ideas of gender and sexual orientation, and argues that Penthesileas 'homosexuellets] Begehren furOtrere' (p. 173) drives her relations with Achilles. While the play undoubtedly offers scope forqueer approaches, Pahl's argument relies on some rather forced readings of the work, while also underplaying the cosmic proportions of Penthesilea's ambition. Christian Moser considers the motif of cannibalism in Penthesilea in the context of eighteenth-century models of political organization, inwhich cannibalism connotes a transitional stage in the civilizing process, which cannot definitively be overcome. While Moser's argument?that the play questions the teleological belief of the Enlightenment in human progress?is not new, his essay makes a genuine contribution by demonstrating how the play is embedded in awider network of eighteenth...

Shakespeare's Tragedies: Violation and Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Violation and Identity B.J. Sokol (bio) Alexander Leggatt. Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Violation and Identity Cambridge University Press. ix, 328. $75.00, 28.99 This gracefully and impeccably written study argues that seven Shakespeare plays share central thematic motifs concerning personal violation and the ravaging of identity. Many of Leggatt's specific analyses offer fresh perceptions founded on close observation; there are particularly subtle readings from Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Macbeth. The plays discussed (Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, in addition to those already mentioned) span the first three quarters of Shakespeare's writing career. Reference is made also to plays as late as The Winter's Tale. That career is often viewed as naturally dividing into phases, each having distinct characteristics of theme, style, and genre. In addition, those Shakespeare plays usually labelled his 'mature' tragedies – which encompass the second half of Leggatt's list – are themselves often viewed as more diverse in tone, construction, and outlook than are other frequently distinguished clusterings, such as Shakespeare's second history cycle, his mid-period 'problem plays,' or his late 'romances.' Leggatt's claims for Shakespearian themes widely in common are therefore bold, exceeding in reach classic studies by the likes of Northrop Frye and G. Wilson Knight. This approach has a potential for opening critical vistas. Yet one must ask if the patterns alleged are convincing and consistent. Consistency is clearly achieved, for each chapter compares a new play with a pattern established in the first chapter. This initial paradigm, happily not a platitude based on currently favoured critical attitudes, arises from a close reading of the the rape and mutilation of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. [End Page 407] Occasionally it may seem that uniformities are forced onto texts. One instance is in a proposal that the carrying off of Lavinia by her precontracted husband Bassianus, called by Saturninus a 'rape,' sets a pattern for Lavinia's subsequent sexual violation and her mutilation by Chiron and Demetrius. Leggatt is well aware that 'rape' had a double meaning. So is Bassianus, who says, '"Rape" call you it, my lord, to seize my own – / My true betrothed love, and now my wife?' while invoking the protection of 'the laws of Rome.' But Leggatt does not identify this linguistic doubleness as highlighting a contrast in the play's first scene between an act defending marital faith and Titus's vindictive hewing the elder brothers of Chiron and Demetrius to pieces, or his peremptory slaying of his own son Mutius. Leggatt also elides the violent patriarchalism imaged in Titus's choosing later to exterminate Lavinia. I find odd also a repeatedly made assertion that Romeo and Juliet's attitude to love excludes its procreative functions. The reverse is true of the Nurse; and all others in the play have variously blinkered views of sexual love, but the tragedy is surely that the young lovers do not. My final examples are repeated assertions that Edgar 'manipulates,' 'tortures,' and even 'kills' the blinded Gloucester. Rather than evidencing such an 'undercurrent of cruelty,' Edgar's actions might better be viewed as a son's attempts to heal or preserve his desperately injured father, despite the cost to himself of his continued disguising. A speculation upon Leggatt's arguably forced readings reveals a possible undercurrent of the whole study. Often its phrasing resembles that seen in the 'object relations theory' of depth psychology. Examples include Leggatt's 'identity created by splitting himself off from his father'; 'projected his own split reality on to Cressida'; 'can only deal with what he has done by splitting himself in two'; and 'on the basis of suffering ... the play's relationships are slowly and painfully reconstructed ... [but this] restoration is infused with memories of the damage it is trying to cure.' I am not suggesting either unconscious or unacknowledged borrowing (I suspect independent discovery). My point is that all the phrases just quoted except the last focus on what object relations theory calls the 'paranoid-schizoid position,' a phase of psychic development characterized by 'splitting' and involving powerful fantasies of torture or mutilation. Only the last locution alludes to the so-called...

Giants in the North: "Douglas", the Scottish Enlightenment, and Scott's "Redgauntlet"

IN THE SUMMER OF 1757, DAVID HUME EXULTED TO A FELLOW-SCOT, IS IT not strange that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our parliaments, our independent Government, even Presence of our Chief Nobility ... that, in these Circumstances, we shou'd really be People most distinguish'd for literature in Europe?(1) Hume may well have had in mind controversial success of his friend John Home's tragedy, Douglas, produced in Edinburgh in late 1756 and in London following spring. Douglas was celebrated by its admirers as decisive proof that Edinburgh had come rival London as a capital of learning and genius.(2) But in his casual way, Hume puts his finger on ambiguities that pervade that play's relationship ideas of nationhood that would be explored in Scotland well into following century by Walter Scott, among others. Specifically, Hume raises question of how nation as a cultural entity is related nation understood as a set of political institutions and activities. How did cultural production and self-conscious cultural identity compensate for loss of political independence and disintegration of public sphere? And where did idea of nationhood fit into discourse of civic virtue that Enlightenment thinkers sought revive? As Home's Douglas tried mesh seamlessly literary public sphere with paradigm of civic virtue, play's supporters argued that public spirit could be manifested by seeing, judging, and surrendering emotionally this heroic Scottish play.(3) But in ensuing controversy, both literary public sphere of Edinburgh and its purportedly nationalist discourse of civic virtue were demystified. Pursuing that critique, this essay argues that Douglas achieved its success by demonstrating how idea of nation could be efficaciously suspended in an imaginary and literally anachronistic void. From vantage point of post-Waterloo Britain, Walter Scott spots this irony in development of identity and suggests in his last Jacobite novel, Redgauntlet (1824), that exercise of civic virtue turns on a highly equivocal nationalism that wishes both disavow and conjure up and conjure with imagination of nationhood. More than author's friendship with David Hume made Douglas into a focal point for tensions and energies of mid-eighteenth-century nationalism. John Home was part of that close-knit circle of clergymen that provided intellectual and social force behind Enlightenment.(4) But Home's tragedy, Douglas, had closer links issue of nationalism in aftermath of failed Jacobite rebellion of 1745. When play was rejected by David Garrick of Drury Lane as totally unfit for stage, Home's Edinburgh friends decided, in Walter Scott's words, to try experiment of a play written by a Scotsman, and produced, for first time, on a provincial stage and thus make a striking bid for cultural autonomy.(5) In a rehearsal in late 1756, William Robertson and Adam Ferguson took parts of Lord and Lady Randolph, David Hume played villain, Hugh Blair maid, and Home himself hero, young Douglas (Sher 77). Other forms of autonomy were also under dispute at this moment: very day that Home's tragedy opened at Edinburgh's Canongate theater Pitt introduced his militia bill in Parliament after a long period of widespread debate, particularly in Scotland. Home's friends, most notably Adam Ferguson, had strongly supported plan for a militia that would renovate a depleted public sphere.(6) Douglas, too, set in a temporally vague but distinctly national past, focuses its dramatic energy on young hero's eagerness win military glory. Pitt's bill would eventually become Militia Act that pointedly excluded Scotland from right bear arms in self-defense; but Douglas would succeed beyond anyone's expectations, [retaining], even seventy years later, in Walter Scott's words, the most indisputable possession of stage. …