Shakespeare's Audience Research Articles

Prospero's Coercive Forgiveness

Act 5 of The Tempest consists in large part of Prospero forgiving his trespassers, but is his act of forgiveness an act of generosity, as we often think of forgiveness? This essay argues that Prospero's forgiveness is actually a response to the repentance and restitution performed (sincerely or not) by Prospero's trespassers, actions that Prospero elicits using punishment. Prospero accuses Caliban of wrongdoing, Caliban refuses to repent, and Prospero punishes him. Prospero (through Ariel) punishes Alonso and accuses him of wrongdoing, he repents, and Prospero forgives him. Prospero accuses Antonio of wrongdoing, Antonio does not repent or refuse to repent, and Prospero forgives him even as he threatens to ruin him politically. After surveying 16th-century Protestant texts, this essay argues that Shakespeare's audience would have been familiar with the notion that forgiveness can follow punishment, repentance, and restitution. Such forgiveness may seem inherently authoritarian, but forgiveness that does not address wrongdoing would seem to disregard justice and risk failing to render each according to their due. In other words, it can be coercive and unjust to use punishment to elicit repentance and restitution, but without repentance and restitution, forgiveness may simply preserve unjust circumstances. Moreover, penitent wrongdoers may willingly assent when a victim or arbiter names a wrong and its consequences. The Tempest therefore provides occasion for reflection on the practice and purpose of forgiveness by staging scenes of forgiveness that fall between coersion and justice.

How did they know it was a sonnet? The beauty of Romeo and Juliet's encounter and a return to form

The article examines the formal properties of Romeo and Juliet's encounter-sonnet, and suggests that Shakespeare included the sonnet for readers he hoped would be repeat play-goers. There are two parts of the case: 1) The first part takes up Romeo and Juliet's first encounter and examines it as a sonnet, orienting the analysis of its poetics through a historicized understanding of poetic form, book culture and theatrical performance; 2) the second asks how a member of Shakespeare's own play audience would have known that the sonnet is one, arguing that s/he might not have without having read the play beforehand. The relationship between quarto-reading and play-going perhaps encouraged audiences to see the play again after reading it. The article concludes by defending the return to form in Shakespeare Studies.

Faith and Sheep's Guts in Much Ado About Nothing

Critics have generally downplayed the dramatic importance of music in Much Ado About Nothing in comparison to other of Shakespeare's plays, especially the later comedies and romances, yet in Shakespeare's most punning play, figurative references to music are central. In Benedick's response to Balthasar's song in act 2 scene 3 – “Is it not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls out of men's bodies” – is a pun that is buried deep enough to be overlooked by modern readers but would not have been inaccessible to the attentive and learned member of Shakespeare's original audience. In this central scene, etymological and cultural associations of music with faith/faithlessness and harmony/discord establish a thematic framework for Benedick's emergence as the agent of fidelity and social harmony in opposition Don John, the agent of discord. This essay begins by establishing Benedick's pun on fidēs (a gut-string for a musical instrument) and fides (faith, loyalty) and its association with a related term, nervus (a sinew or tendon, sometimes used for the string of a musical instrument), in early modern lexicography. The essay then goes on to examine the theoretical association in early modern musicology of music with personal, social, and universal order and harmony; of particular interest is the cultural commonplace that strings made of sheep's and wolf's guts wound together are inevitably and inherently discordant. In this context the antipathy between sheep and wolf gut becomes an emblem for understanding the way in which Shakespeare frames the developing conflict between Benedick and Don John through discord and the re-establishment of social harmony in the marriage of Hero and Claudio.

Personating leadership: Shakespeare's Henry V and performative negotiation

This essay examines early modern notions of ideal and problematic leadership through the lens of Shakespeare's King Henry V. The piece argues that critical depictions of Henry as either charismatic or Machiavellian are reductive; Henry's success as a monarch derives from his ability to balance necessary authority with what I term 'performative negotiation.' In this model, Henry's publicly constructed persona serves as a means of 'negotiating' his sovereignty with his subjects, but also acts as an exemplum for the present and future mon- archs of England. Narratives of both leaders and leadership appear frequently in works of literature, from children's stories to the great works of the Western literary canon (Shushok and Moore 2010; Nelhs 2012). Since 'leadership is rooted in storytelling' (Nehls 2012, p. 64), it should be natural for leadership scholars to turn to literature for examples of and arguments about leadership. William Shakespeare's Henry V, based on the historical successes of the fifteenth-century English king, is deeply concerned with the complex nature of leadership. Particularly when considered in relation to its original context, Henry V indicates the complicated and often vexed relationship between Shakespeare's audience and their Elizabethan monarch. In 1599, the date of the play's inaugural per- formance, the presentation of monarchy on the public stage was an act of political speech, subject to critique from authority even as it was itself able to (cautiously) part- icipate in contemporary sociopolitical discussions of the nature - and appropriate limitations - of monarchy (Axton 1977). By examining Henry V as an allegorical repre- sentation of English monarchy, we are shown a picture of sovereignty that is simulta- neously idealized and fallible. This paradoxical interpretation of Shakespeare's most successful king is reflected by the fact that despite Henry's obvious position as a military and political leader, there is still some scholarly debate over whether his reputation as 'the mirror of all Christian kings' (II.0.6) 1 is the product of effective or manipulative leadership (Rabkin 1977; Pye 1990; Deats 2004). The crux of the contention is that Henry is a consum- mate performer who appears in multiple guises: a captain concerned about the well- being of his soldiers, an actor who assumes the guise of a commoner, and a king who threatens the city of Harfleur with atrocity, orders the execution of the French prisoners of war, and nevertheless still spurs his men to great victory at Agincourt. 1. All Henry V citations are from the 1995 edition shown in the reference list.

"This is above all strangeness": <i>King Lear</i>, Ethics, and the Phenomenology of Recognition

"This is above all strangeness":King Lear, Ethics, and the Phenomenology of Recognition James Kearney (bio) The title page of the 1608 quarto of King Lear informs its readers that the play they hold offers the "True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of TOM of Bedlam." Lear is an ostensibly historical figure from the chronicle tradition, of course, but Edgar is a character imported from romance, specifically from the tale of the Paphlagonian King in Philip Sidney's Arcadia. When discussing the suturing of the romance subplot onto the traditional story of Lear and his three daughters, most critics draw our attention to the ways in which the two fathers—Lear and Gloucester—mirror each other in their respective falls from grace. The title page of the 1608 quarto, however, neglects the father in favor of the son, drawing our attention to the potential centrality of Edgar's narrative, and particularly Edgar's stint as Poor Tom, to early modern readers and audiences. As a figure that seems to have wandered out of the romance tradition, Edgar-as-Tom carries with him certain generic expectations, most notably the expectation that the disguised son and heir will be revealed, recognized. This romance trope is evoked only to be frustrated, however, and this thwarted expectation creates a character who is always more than he seems, always pregnant with a meaning to which other characters—and, in particular, Lear and Gloucester—are blind. In this essay, I track the strange specter of Poor Tom as he wanders across the tragic landscape of Lear, upsetting audience expectation and triggering ethically charged theatrical moments. My argument is that Shakespeare deploys the romance figure of Poor Tom as a kind of ethical catalyst in the play, forcing Lear and Gloucester to wrestle both with the fact of human abjection and with the phenomenological opacity of the other person. Phenomenology famously struggles with the problem of the phenomenon of the other person.1 Here, I turn to Emmanuel Levinas's radical [End Page 455] reframing of this problem to attempt to make sense of Poor Tom's effect in Lear, the effect of the stranger who is all too familiar in his abjection.2 Broadly speaking, I am interested in the epistemological structure of recognition as a coming to knowledge, as a movement from the unknown to the known. More specifically, I am interested in the ways in which Shakespeare plays with the audience's expectations vis-à-vis this advent of knowledge in King Lear. By deferring and denying the coming into knowledge that generic cues promise, Shakespeare draws our attention to the ways in which his characters apprehend the unknown and, in particular, the other person, the stranger. In Lear, Shakespeare seems interested in deferring or denying recognition in order to create dramatically tense and highly fraught ethical encounters. And in those scenes in which characters engage with the problem of Poor Tom, Shakespeare does so, I argue, in order to stage the possibility—or impossibility—of an ethical relation to the stranger. Unaccommodated Man, Learned Theban The scene in King Lear in which a dispossessed Lear meets an abject Tom o'Bedlam has long been considered central to the play's reflections on deprivation and need, empathy and human fellow-feeling. It is much less frequently noted that the scene has all the markings of a recognition scene from the romance tradition. Trained to read such scenes, Shakespeare's audience might expect Tom o'Bedlam's unveiling; they might expect Lear to recognize Edgar not as abject and other but as the same, a figure of the same aristocratic class who has fallen as Lear has. In fact, however, Poor Tom is never unveiled on stage, and the audience never witnesses a scene in which either Lear or Gloucester recognizes Edgar once he adopts his disguise. That recognition and the failure to recognize feature heavily in King Lear has been noted by many observers. When discussing Lear, however, most critics tend to focus on one kind...

Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance DramaThe Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Lorna Hutson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. x+382.

<i>Lorna Hutson,</i> The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama<i>The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama</i>. Lorna Hutson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. x+382.

Shakespeare in stages: new theatre histories

Introduction Christine Dymkowski and Christie Carson Part I. Notions of Authenticity: 1. The move indoors Andrew Gurr 2. Whig heroics: Shakespeare, Cibber, and the troublesome King John Elaine M. McGirr 3. Coriolanus and the (in)authenticities of William Poel's platform stage Lucy Munro 4. 'A fresh advance in Shakespearean production': Tyrone Guthrie in Canada Neil Carson 5. Authenticity in the 21st century: Propeller and Shakespeare's Globe Abigail Rokison Part II. Attitudes Towards Sex and Gender: 6. Performing beauty on the Renaissance stage Farah Karim-Cooper 7. The artistic, cultural, and economic power of the actress in the age of Garrick Fiona Ritchie 8. Women writing Shakespeare's women in the nineteenth century: The Winter's Tale Jan McDonald 9. 'Not our Olivia': Lydia Lopokova and Twelfth Night Elizabeth Schafer 10. Measure for Measure: Shakespeare's twentieth-century play Christine Dymkowski Part III. Questions of Identity: 11. Shakespeare and the rhetoric of scenography 1770-1825 Christopher Baugh 12. The presence of Shakespeare Susan Bennett 13. Finding local habitation: Shakespeare's Dream at play on the stage of contemporary Australia Kate Flaherty and Penny Gay 14. 'Haply for I am black': shifting race and gender dynamics in Talawa's Othello Lynette Goddard 15. British directors in post-colonial South Africa Brian Pearce Epilogue: Shakespeare's audiences as imaginative communities Christie Carson.

"Sumptuously Re-edified": The Reformation of Sacred Space in Titus Andronicus

"Sumptuously Re-edified":The Reformation of Sacred Space in Titus Andronicus Helga L. Duncan (bio) Blessed bodie! Whither art thou thrown?No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone? —George Herbert, "Sepulchre," from The Temple (1633) Thy two-leaved gates, fair temple, unfold,And these two in thy sacred bosom hold,Till, mystically joined, but one they be;Then may thy lean and hunger-starved womb,Long time expect their bodies and their tomb. —John Donne, "Epithalamion Made at Lincoln's Inn" (1633) I. Martyred Bodies and Sacred Space Readings of Shakespeare's grim drama of mutilation Titus Andronicus have time and again focused on the play's marred bodies.1 Recently, scholars have made a connection between physical violence and characters' frequent allusions to martyrdom and argued for the play as a complex [End Page 425] meditation on England's bloody struggles over religious reformation.2 While sacrificial victimhood and its function in the play's gruesome dramatic logic has received some attention, there has been virtually no critical engagement with the sites that generate martyrdom. But it is Rome's spiritual geography (with the Andronicus tomb at its center) that produces the play's dramatic conflict. Titus, who calls the family grave "sacred receptacle of my joys," is committed to maintaining its sanctity at all costs; he insists that only in this hallowed place his dead sons, "slain in [their] country's wars" on foreign battlefields, will finally "sleep in peace" (1.1.94–95). I will argue that in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare is not only concerned with the bloody culture of martyrdom, but more intensely with the constitution of and challenges to sacred space. The culture of sacred spaces in Shakespeare's Rome produces what Robert Miola has termed a "fruitful estrangement"; at the same time, the play's "cultural drift"—the shift to the world of ancient Rome on the threshold of collapse—allows the playwright to comment on contemporary theological issues by way of an exotic religious culture.3 According to Carlos M. N. Eire, in a post-Reformation world "one holy place after another vanished from the map, first in Germany and Switzerland, later in France, the Netherlands, and England," leaving "the unity of the European religious vision … forever shattered."4 Toward the end of the play, a Gothic soldier admits to having "strayed" from his troops "to gaze on a ruinous monastery" (5.1.21). This famously anachronistic throwaway line appears to confirm that for Shakespeare's audience, traditional sacred spaces were a thing of the past. Philip Schwyzer suggests that Shakespeare's soldier gazes so intently to wrest some meaning from the decayed structure, but "the ruin in question declines to deliver up the expected moral."5 Even if the crumbling edifice is undecipherable for the Goth in this scene, it is a powerful signifier for the audience, a symbol of religious conflicts that altered spatial perception and the believer's place in the spiritual and material worlds. In what follows, I suggest that Shakespeare's early tragedy constitutes a powerful drama of sacred space, or, more precisely, a drama about its destructive "reformations." The playwright, by staging the tragic profanation of ancient holy sites and the grotesque counterreformations it produces, offers a bleak portrait of spatial and spiritual displacement in a culture on the cusp of profound religious change. In [End Page 426] Titus Andronicus, a return to a venerable culture of sacred space is difficult and indeed undesirable because of the unrelenting violence that attends spatial consecration and renders Rome deeply compromised after Titus undertakes a forceful attempt at counterreformation. When Titus's son Lucius enforces the sanctity of the Andronicus grave in as violent a manner as his father, we do not question the deep-rooted spiritual need for sacred spaces but lament the failure to rethink the place of the sacred in the wake of cataclysmic violence generated by the space of the grave. Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which opens and closes on a funeral, assigns the sacred geography of burial a key role in spiritually and culturally situating a society and associates the modification and loss of traditional sacred sites with a culture's impending...

Writing the Tragic Self: &lt;i&gt;Richard II&lt;/i&gt;'s Sad Stories

When Shakespeare has Richard II call for the telling of "sad stories" he is not merely alluding to a tradition of medieval de casibus tragedy, but rather engaging with a well-known vision of historical teleology, popularized in Shakespeare's time by narrative historical tragedies. Shakespeare's audience, largely ignorant of the basic facts of English history, were familiar with this tragic form of history. Richard is a "self-authored subject" who finally brings his represented self into continuity with the de casibus vision.

Alabama Shakespeare Festival's The War of the Roses

Reviewed by: Alabama Shakespeare Festival's The Wars of the Roses Henry VI, Part A, and: Henry VI, Part B, and: Richard III James N. Ortego II Alabama Shakespeare Festival's The Wars of the Roses Henry VI, Part A Presented by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival at the Octagon Stage, Montgomery, Alabama. February 23-May 17, 2007. Directed by Diana Van Fossen, Composed by James Conely, and Orchestrated by Thom Jenkins. Scene Designs by Paul Wonsek. Costumes by Beth Novak. Lighting by Paul Wonsek. Sound Design by Brett Rominger. Fight Scenes by Scot Mann and Jason Armit. With Ray Chambers (John Duke of Bedford), Anthony Reimer (Charles the Dauphin), Michael Gatto (Reignier King of Naples), Patrick McElwee (The Duke of Alencon), Paul Hopper (Humphrey Duke of Gloucester), Will Pailen (Thomas Beaufort Duke of Exeter), Jeffrey Brick (Richard Plantagenet), Gardner Reed (Joan la Pucelle), Marcus Kyd (William Earl of Suffolk), James Beaman (Lord Talbot), Lisa Bruneau (Margaret), and others. Henry VI, Part B Presented by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival at the Octagon Stage, Montgomery, Alabama. March 16-June 8, 2007. Directed by Geoffrey Sherman, Composed by James Conely, and Orchestrated by Thom Jenkins. Scenes designed by Paul Wonsek. Costumes by Beth Novak. Lighting by Paul Wonsek. Sound Design by Brett Rominger. Fight Scenes by Scot Mann and Jason Armit. Stage Manager Kimberly First. With Nick Cordileone (King Henry the Sixth), Lise Bruneau (Margaret, Queen to King Henry), Patrick McElwee (Edward Prince of Wales), Will Pailen (Duke of Exeter), Jeffrey Brick (Richard Plantagenet Duke of York), Adam Richman (Edward later King Edward IV), John-Michael Marrs (Richard Duke of Gloucester), Hollis McCarthy (Lady Elizabeth Grey), Mark Allen Jeter (Duke of Somerset), and others. Richard III Presented by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival at the Octagon Stage, Montgomery, Alabama. April 13-June 10, 2007. Directed by Susan Willis, Composed by James Conely, and Orchestrated by Thom Jenkins. Scene and lighting by Paul Wonsek. Costumes by Elizabeth Novak. Sound by Brett Rominger. Voice and Dialect Coach Sarah Felder. Fight Scenes by Scot Mann and Jason Armit. With Adam Richman (King Edward IV), Holis McCarthy (Elizabeth Grey, Queen to Edward IV), Dana Benningfield (Prince Edward later Edward V), Mark Robinson (Lord Grey), Ray Chambers (Richard Duke of Gloucester), Celeste Burnum (The Duchess of York), Marcus Kyd (George Duke of Clarence), James Beaman (Lord Hastings), Mark Allan Jeter (Anthony Woodville Earl of Rivers) Jeffrey Brick (Duke of Buckingham), Will Pailen (Henry Tudor Earl of Richmond later King Henry VII), and others. At 2:00 pm sharp on April 28, 2007, director Diana Van Fossen appeared to a capacity crowd surrounding the Octagon Stage at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF) and urged all spectators to silence their electronic devices. Her comments marked the last reference to twenty-first-century life that spectators would hear during a three-hour journey that dramatized English political upheaval and turmoil during the fifteenth century. The ASF's lively rendition of Henry VI, Part A remained true to Shakespeare's text in plot, characterization, and costume, but much like Shakespeare's audience, modern spectators had to rely on a lively imagination to supplement the dramatization on stage. Two large doors located at back center stage opened to a hard-wood floor about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide; two stairways on opposite ends of the center doors enabled the actors to ascend onto a smaller balcony (and spectators to upper-row seating) that served as the second story of a castle; a few props such as swords and fifteenth-century costumes completed the stage design for the play. Anything lacking in the scenic design, however, was quickly forgotten by spectators once the talented troupe began their energetic performance; [End Page 114] but this dramatization of Henry VI, which aspired to reproduce Shakespeare's play as his audience might have experienced it, included occasionally overly vociferous delivery of dialogue, which at times dampened the spirit of his play. The sparse scenic designs and boisterous emoting aside, the ASF managed to overcome the challenges faced by any modern acting company that undertakes to dramatize Shakespeare and remain faithful to the Elizabethan dramatic spirit, and few spectators, if any, were disappointed in the final product...

The Trickster as Comic Hero

The debate still rages among critics regarding the relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV (Parts 1 & 2). Is Hal right to banish Falstaff when the former becomes King Henry V? Or is Falstaff the true of these plays? Indeed, does Hal promote a Machiavellian vision or the genuine interests of law and justice? Is his vision ofthe king as isolated by heavy responsibilities compatible with a concern for the common man? I want to resurrect this debate and its related questions in order to spell out what I will call the ethics of chaotic dissent, a characteristic feature, I will argue, of all dynamic human systems. To achieve this end, I will first summarize the key issues of this never-ending debate surrounding the relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal. One of the key distinctions to be clarified will be between the notion of Machiavellian politics and that ofthe concept of amorality. Next I will examine the problematic nature of the comic hero. According to Aristotle, comedy's function is to act as a satirical corrective of human vice. However, though the buffoon makes fun of the overly serious, boorish desire for order, he himself is guilty of an excessive levity. Why then do we not only sympathize with but celebrate the outrageous behavior ofthe buffoon in so many comedies? Indeed, how can a laughable character like the buffoon be considered a hero if he has failed to achieve the virtuous mean? I will look for the answer to this question in part from a consideration ofthe mythological character ofthe trickster and its role in every culture. Just how a trickster can resemble a comic but not a Machiavellian schemer will be clarified. Finally, I will examine the role of chaotic agents in the chaos theory underlying non-linear systems as the best framework for understanding Falstaff, comic heroes, and tricksters. Only then will I be in a position to outline my notion of the ethics of chaotic dissent, one that will distinguish the opposition to specific moral norms from the opposition to the moral enterprise itself. That sometimes the promotion of vice is the only means to preserve virtue will be the paradoxical conclusion of this essay. The Critical Debate over Henry IV Shakespeare's two-part drama ofthe rise of Prince Hal to the throne of England revolves around the battle between the Percy clan and King Henry IV. This king fears that his usurpation of the throne of King Richard may be repeated in young Hotspur's revolt against Henry's rule. Nevertheless, he admires the chivalric honor and courage of young Percy in contrast to the apparently shallow character of his own son, Prince Hal, who spends his time at a tavern in the company of a disreputable rogue named Jack Falstaff. He would prefer his son to be under the tutelage of the Lord Chief- Justice ofthe King's Bench. In Part One we are allowed to observe this bizarre relationship between the young prince and his surrogate father, Falstaff, as well as Hal's transformation into the who triumphs over young Hotspur, even though he allows Falstaff to take credit for this victory. In Part Two we see Falstaff 's attempts to cash in on his newly gained honor, the final defeat of the revolt against Henry IV, the latter's deatii, and the new king's unexpected banishment of his former friend. Critics have long been divided on whether we should regret or applaud Shakespeare's decision to permit the banishment of Falstaff. John Dover Wilson argues that we must see Shakespeare's two-part drama as a traditional morality play in which the prodigal prince overcomes the temptations posed by the devil and returns to his father, transformed into someone able to take up the responsibilities of the ideal king.1 On this view, Falstaff, as the riotous tempter, provides the amusement necessary to make palatable the play's moral in- struction for Shakespeare's audience.2 However, it is only proper for him to be finally banished if moral virtue is indeed to triumph. …

Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe by Andrew Hadfield, Paul Hammond

520 Reviews earliest to have been lost to his eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors-which such knowledge implied. UNIVERSITY OF LEIDEN RICHARD TODD Shakespeare andRenaissanceEurope. Ed. by ANDREW HADFIELD and PAULHAMMOND. (Arden Shakespeare Companions) London: Thompson Learning. 2004. xxix + 3I4PP. ?i6.99. ISBN I-90427-I46-4. What was Shakespeare's attitude towards Europe? To what extent were Shakespeare and his contemporaries influenced by European politics and literature? The signifi cant number of Shakespeare's plays that have continental settings-Verona, Venice, Athens, and Vienna, for example-suggests something of the fascination and allure that Europe held for Shakespeare and his audiences. But should we regard these settings as accurate depictions of Renaissance Europe, or are they rather excursions into an imaginary geography, the product of awriter who conceived of the world in literary and metaphorical-rather than political-terms? These questions are the focus of the latest volume in the handsomely produced Arden Critical Companions series. Andrew Hadfield introduces the essays in the col lection as an 'attempt to illuminate our understanding of the impact of Europe on Shakespeare's life as awriter' (p. I7). The volume offers awide-ranging exploration of this issue, with contributions from both literary scholars and historians on such top ics as 'The Politics of Renaissance Europe', 'English Contact with Europe', 'Shake speare and Italian Comedy', and 'Europe's Mediterranean Frontier: The Moor'. The scholarship evidenced throughout is impressive, and the material often fascinating, although at times a tension emerges between the contributors' desire to yoke Shake speare to his European context and their acknowledgement that Shakespeare's texts invariably resist this sort of contextualizing reading. At the outset Hadfield observes that 'Shakespeare was concerned to employ what John Gillies has called a "poetic geography", amode of perception that envisaged theworld existing in terms of ideas, not areas' (p. 3). This observation complicates the volume's attempts to set Shake speare's works in relation to their European contexts inways that are not always fully resolved. For example, Susan Doran's opening chapter offers a detailed historical survey of the politics of Renaissance Europe, and convincingly argues that Shakespeare's audiences would have been well informed about political and military affairs on the Continent through pamphlets, newsletters, and other printed material. However, she concludes with the admission that Shakespeare 'did not draw on European current affairs for the plots of his plays' (p. 52). As Paulina Kewes points out later in the volume, this is in direct contrast to Shakespeare's fellow dramatists, who 'produced remarkably acute and accurate depictions of specific [European] figures and events' (p. 5 I). In this way, the Shakespeare that this collection describes turns out to be a relatively apolitical writer, one more interested in the idea of Europe- and the way in which other Renaissance writers conceived of it-than the actuality. Stuart Gillespie provides an illuminating chapter on Shakespeare's reading of European literature, and his indebtedness to novelistic storytellers such as Bandello, Belleforest, and Cinthio, although even here Gillespie has to acknowledge that Shakespeare would have been more likely 'to connect writers through generic links than nationality' (p. 99). Perhaps the essay thatmost directly engages with Shakespeare's works is Francois Laroque's rich and suggestive piece on 'Shakespeare's Imaginary Geography'. La roque notes that Shakespeare's plays 'repeatedly emphasize locality, seen both as real places and as dream-like backdrops' (p. 193), and argues that Shakespeare writes MLR, IOI.2, 2006 521 within a tradition of 'impossible locations and imaginary geography' (p. I96). The fact that 'real' locations in Shakespeare's plays are often, as Laroque points out, paired with an imaginary twin-such as Athens and the wood in the Dream, or the Court and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It-reminds us that we should not be too literal-minded in our attempts to pin down Shakespeare's geography. In this way, one could argue that the tensions at play in this volume stem from Shakespeare himself, and perhaps the book would have been yet more successful had this been acknowledged more fully. Nevertheless, this is an informative and scholarly study that is admirably open and exploratory in its...

Making the Woman of Him: Shakespeare's Man Right Fair as Sonnet Lady

Hort. A will make the man mad to make the woman of him. Kate. Yong budding Virgin, faire, and fresh, & sweet, Whether away, or whether is thy aboade? Happy the Parents of so faire a childe; Happier the man whom fauourable stars A lots thee for his louely bedfellow. Petr. Why how now Kate, I hope thou art not mad, This is a man old, wrickled, faded withered, And not a Maiden as thou saist he is. (The Taming of the Shrew 4.5.35-44; 2333-41)1 As part of his program of subordination, Petruchio assigns the exhausted Katherine yet another ridiculous task. He commands her to address the aged Vincentio as if he were a beautiful young woman fit for ecstatic poetical praise. She complies immediately, instantaneously constructing the feminine with the bland, cliché terms of address that sonneteers reserve for their subjects: "faire," "sweet," "lovely." Having skewed his bride's gender coordinates, Petruchio realigns them to their rightful places. Men are not women and should not be addressed in this fashion. To make a man into a woman will make him mad, as Hortensio, better than a chorus, declares. The passage suggests that male and female represented separate and discrete entities to Shakespeare's audience and to the boys and men playing women's roles. So Hic Mulier explains with some heat to Haec Vir (her epithet for him, "my dear Feminine-Masculine," no compliment): "even by the Laws of Nature, by the rules of Religion, and the Customs of all civil Nations, it is necessary that there be a distinct and special difference between Man and Woman."2 Yet as Catherine Belsey and countless others have noted over the last two decades, Shakespeare "disrupts" this sexual difference in his plays [End Page 271] with an almost peevish insistence, again and again.3 As these critics often remind us, his playhouse audience enjoyed comedies in which boys played girls who pretend to be boys because they secretly love other boys and want, quite desperately in some cases, to be loved as girls: Viola (Twelfth Night), Rosalind (As You Like It), Imogen (Cymbeline), and, to a lesser extent, Portia (The Merchant of Venice). This viewership may have been troubled by such spectacles and might have regarded the proceedings as a form of child abuse. Or, since such concepts have recently been judged anachronistic for analyzing same-sex relations in Shakespeare's time, one could also argue that this audience may not have read the dynamic as homoerotic or pedophilic, suspended its disbelief and accepted the boys as girls. Criticism on the topic will probably never exhaust itself. It will certainly never reach a consensus.4 The scrum of competing genders and sexualities in the playhouse has naturally spilled over into discussions of Shake-speares Sonnets (1609). I cite the above passage from The Taming of the Shrew as a key for reading parts of his controversial lyric sequence, since it shares some of the play's dynamics, albeit in reversed form. In the Sonnets, a poet creates an older speaker, "Will," who repeats blandishments to a younger male person, the Man Right Fair (so described in Sonnet 144).5 In Shrew, Petruchio is in effect a puppeteer who compels a younger female speaker, Katherine, to woo an older man. Her compulsory speech-act of linguistic seduction humiliates Vincentio because she "transgenders" him by misdescribing him as female. That Petruchio compels Katherine to exhibit this poetical behavior as part of his program of mind-control and spirit breaking suggests that such encomiastic exercises contain an element of masochism for the person who praises. That he so violently hypercorrects his bride after her compliance with his fatuous demand suggests just how wrongheaded such overt gender-bending might have seemed to early modern people. Perhaps these...

‘Shakespeare and eco-criticism: The unexpected return of the Elizabethan World Picture’

In the early 1970s the Gaia hypothesis of James E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis proposed that self-regulating processes of homeostasis have locked together the obviously living biosphere and the apparently dead environment so that one might usefully think of the whole Earth as a single organism. Although Lovelock and Margulis came from strictly scientific fields it is easy to see the appeal of their hypothesis for ‘alternative’ Western cultures of the New Age movement, complementary medicine, and holistic spiritualism, all of which have links with the broader anarchist and animal rights movements and with the emerging theory and practice of eco-criticism. At its best, eco-criticism builds upon post-structuralism's rejection of the imaginary unified human subject previously dominant in literary studies to consider how Nature too is constructed as well as depicted in literary works. At the other extreme, however, eco-criticism shades off into a neo-Romantic spiritualism that merely asserts the healing power of living in the countryside or vicariously enjoying it through literature about rural idylls. This essay considers the materialist basis of the Gaia hypothesis, comparing it to ways of thinking about the world that were available to Shakespeare's audiences and in particular its surprising parallels with the much-reviled Elizabethan World Picture described by E. M. W. Tillyard.

Shakespeare's Edward III : A Consolation for English Recusants

Shakespeare's EdwardIII: A Consolation for English Recusants J. P. CONLAN With the publication of three new editions in the past five years, The Raign ofKing Edward the Third has reemerged as a prominent candidate for inclusion in the Shakespeare canon.1 Nonetheless, the play still continues to be received with suspicion. Critics recognize it is written in a genre, the chronicle history, that Shakespeare dominated in his day and admit the play has the same variety of imagery, a similar texture ofvocabulary, and verbal parallels to Shakespeare's other dramas.2 Notwithstanding, few scholars are willing to embrace the play wholeheartedly as Shakespeare's own. The problem, they claim, is the play lacks dramatic unity. As they see it, the play appears to be divided into two poorly integrated halves. The first two acts focus on the king's campaign to seduce the Countess of Salisbury; then, the theater of operations shifts abruptly to France and the Hundred Years' War to detail the English conquests at Sluys, Crecy, Calais, and Poitiers. This largely unexplained bifurcation within the play between love and war, shame and honor, England and France, has cast the play and its playwright into disrepute for centuries, and it is upon this legacy ofcensure that skepticism about Shakespeare's authorship of the play has its most secure foundation.3 Among those who see Shakespeare's hand in the play, this perceived lack ofdramatic unity has generated a wide range ofspecial pleading. To explain this singular fact, A. F. Hopkinson has told us that Shakespeare's "sublimegeniusspurnedatarbitraryrulesandrestraints,"4thatthetwoplots in themselves must be considered as separate plays, and as the dramatic unity in each is perfect, the play as a whole is therefore in Shakespeare's manner.5 Kenneth Muir has told us that Shakespeare collaborated with 177 178Comparative Drama anotherplaywright, asyet undiscovered.6Melchiori and others havetold us that Shakespeare contributed the king and countess scenes to a play alreadywritten.7 J. J. M. Tobin has told us that EdwardIIIstages an education of princes, its two episodes tied together by a concern for selfmastery .8And Eric Sams, to support his contention that past complaints about EdwardTITs lack ofdramatic unity are overstated, has argued that "each [subplot] is adroitly aligned as a separate aspect ofone single unifyingtopic , namelythe rights and wrongs ofvows and promises,"9 in the process conflating unity oftheme with unity of plot. Such descriptions of"Shakespeare's"craftsmanship,however,leavethisplayabroken thing. In neglecting the rationale that necessitates the sequence of action, the play's defenders inadvertently confirm the century-old hypothesis that "[t]hough there may indeed exist a sort of interior connexion between the episode and the principal plot, yet it appears more than doubtful whether the linkjoining the two parts was easily, ifat all, discoverable by the play-going public ofthe age."10 In actuality, this century-oldhypothesis is unfounded. In sustaining it, critics do not merely consign this play to ignominy. Edward III is most cohesive as a brilliantly incisive critique of the official propaganda sustaining the persecution of English recusants after the Invincible Armada's defeat. Denying the unity of the play and thus Shakespeare's authorship perpetuates the myth ofShakespeare as a Tudor apologist unconcerned with the course ofthe English Reformation. Allusions to the Armada's defeat within Edward III have been used to date the play, but critics remarking on them have tended to assume that the play was originally written to exploit swelling patriotic feeling.11 But this reading ofthe play is entirely too naive. Certainly to Elizabeth, as to other members of Shakespeare's audience who were educated in medieval history and who had seen in Mary's last year on the throne the loss ofCalais, Edward'svictoryinFrance wasbut a temporaryhighpoint, a peak in the long and tumultuous Hundred Years' War. Just as educated viewers would have known that the Black Prince would break his health in later years while pursuing the claim to France, finally dying in 1376, so too they would have been aware that Edward III finally succumbed to his lust, wallowing in the shocking affair with Alice Perrers, /. P. Conlan179 misconduct which encouraged the Good Parliament to impeach the King's lack ofrestraint and introduce...

Knowledge and Belief in The Winter's Tale

At narrative moment immediately preceding animation of Hermione's statue, Paulina exhorts Leontes, It is requir'd / You do awake your faith.' Faith in what? For Leontes, it is faith in reality of miracles, coming back to life of a queen who has been dead sixteen long years. For William Shakespeare's audience, it is faith tied to willing suspension of disbelief, a readiness to accept that theater is capable of representing just about anything. But it is not only in representational space of theater that dead find themselves coming back to life. Scripture itself purports to offer inerrant accounts of people who have come back from dead: daughter of Shunamite woman in Old Testament book of 2 Kings, Jarius's daughter, Lazarus, and, of course, Christ himself, described typologically as the firstfruits of them that slept.2 The animation of Hermione's statue in The Winter's Tale finds its informing source not only in mythic account of Ovid's perennially popular Pygmalion, but also in stories of resurrection afforded by Scripture. With regard to Bible, one source Shakespeare appears to have had in mind when producing The Winter's Tale is book of 2 Kings. The bear's devouring of Antigonus is Shakespeare's revision of story found in this book, of how prophet Elisha called up a bear to kill off some young kids who had audacity to mock his bald pate.3 The book of 2 Kings also offers following account of miraculous resuscitation that might have constituted a central scriptural source informing Shakespeare's representation of enlivening statue:

Temperance and the End of Time: Emblematic Antony and Cleopatra

Antony and Cleopatra both delights and bewilders with its extraordinary diversity. Classical mythology, biblical apocalypse and thematic insistence on the virtue of temperance meet in enlightening combinations and puzzling disjunctions. Critical analysis, precisely because it is analysis, tends to isolate one or two aspects of the play and to discuss them to the exclusion of others. Perhaps it is time to ask whether one should attempt a synthesis that makes some attempt to see the dominant motifs in the play in relation to each other: is there any way that we can begin to see this play whole? And, if we can, can we test our impressions against likely overall responses among members of Shakespeare's first audience? For if this play meant anything in particular when it was first performed, its mysteries will only be yielded up to those who are prepared to inquire what those particularities were. In short, what I am proposing here is the study of Antony and Cleopatra as a cultural artefact that can be reliably interpreted only in terms of the broad cultural context from which it emerged. Literary attempts to consider texts contextually have flourished in the last twenty years, but the dominant modes of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism have tended to employ the relationship between text and context in order to demonstrate that each subversively deconstructs the other. In drama, subversions are frequently important because, as Mikhail Bakhtin and others have demonstrated, carnivalesque inversions of norms lie at the heart of the Western cultural experience in the theater.1 It is not always useful, however, to follow the pathways of subversive irony, anomaly, and cultural contradiction to the exclusion of what is cohesive. To be more specific, alternative readings of Shakespeare are valuable and to be welcomed as long as they admit that alternatives to the alternatives have at least equal validity.2

"To show scorn her own image": The Varieties of Education in The Taming of the Shrew

"To show scorn her own image": The Varieties of Education in The Taming ofthe Shrew Dennis S. Brooks University ofNebraska-Lincoln Recent work on The Taming ofthe Shrew has contended that such problematic features of the play as the open-ended Sly framework, the interrelationships among the various subplots, Petruchio's treatment of Kate, and Kate's notorious final speech are illuminated by such themes as patriarchy, game-playing, and the Ovidian transformations that Shakespeare uses throughout this phase of his career.1 However valid these approaches may be, the disparate themes, anomalies, and subplots of The Taming of the Shrew coalesce into a dramatic unity when framed by the broader Renaissance debate over education. To be sure, The Shrew is a romantic farce; it would be a mistake to reduce the play to a simple examination of the timeworn nature vs. nurture debate. But to approach The Shrew without considering Renaissance theories of education is analogous to approaching The Tempest without taking into account Renaissance beliefs concerning magic.2 1 shall argue below that, while Renaissance education theorists vigorously debated the most efficient and effective means to impart literacy and numeracy, all sides agreed that education was a complex process of socialization. Through it, the student learns to acquiesce to the prevailing social hierarchies by internalizing the dominant value system and tempering those passions that threaten social order: namely, irascibility and concupiscence. Such self-mastery enables the student to accept his or her designated role in society.3 This theory of education undergirds The Shrew's Induction and the play-within-the-play. In the context of this theory, both the on-stage lord and his courtiers and Shakespeare's audience, ranging from groundlings to court wits, might have viewed Petruchio and Kate not only as a swaggering, patriarchal boor and an Amazonian icon, but also as exempla of the educative function of mimetic art. Groundlings and wits alike in the on- and off-stage audiences would have seen Kate's tantrums as a mirror of their own lack of self-control, her transformation into a submissive wife as a reflection of their potential for Renaissance versions of educated civility, and Petruchio's roughand -tumble approach to courtship and marriage as exemplary of a pedagogy that might move them from incorrigibility to civility.4 Lucentio's and Hortensio's love-in-idleness and their wooing of 8 Rocky Mountain Review Bianca, in which they appropriate conventional tutorials not to educate but to seduce, illustrate a miseducation that fails to socialize and results in misfits like Sly who press what knowledge they possess into the service of their asocial appetites. The Shrew does not reflect a consensus in Renaissance pedagogy, for there was none. The play does, however, depict with broad brush-strokes two dominant continental pedagogies: the regimented rote learning advocated by reformation and Jesuit theorists, and the private tutorials championed by some of the more innovative humanists . These two approaches vied for the attention of English intellectuals disenchanted with the English grammar school tradition. In The Shrew, Shakespeare weighs both and, finding them wanting, proposes as an alternative what I call, following Sidney, an eikastic education.5 In an eikastic education, the theatre is the model classroom : students and teachers together act out lessons, and teachers seek to allure students to virtue through worthy models found in art, just as "great poets . . . allure the credulous to their improvement ," and poetry "lurefs] away nobler souls from those foundering under moral disease" (Boccaccio 78). It is in this spirit that the lord produces for Sly a play-within-the-play in which Petruchio's courtship of Kate and their subsequent marriage constitute her education in self-mastery. First in the Induction, then in the playwithin -the-play, Shakespeare explores the use of arts to tame humanity's asocial passions in the interests of civility. Shakespeare's belief in the ability of the arts to temper anti-social impulses and attitudes echoes the belief, widely held among Renaissance education theorists, that moral education is a fundamental means of socialization. Reformers and Jesuits alike viewed the academy as a place in which the human personality could be refashioned in conformity to their...

"To Show Scorn Her Own Image": The Varieties of Education in "The Taming of the Shrew"

Recent work on The Taming of the Shrew has contended that such problematic features of the play as the open-ended Sly framework, the interrelationships among the various subplots, Petruchio's treatment of Kate, and Kate's notorious final speech are illuminated by such themes as patriarchy, game-playing, and the Ovidian transformations that Shakespeare uses throughout this phase of his career.' However valid these approaches may be, the disparate themes, anomalies, and subplots of The Taming of the Shrew coalesce into a dramatic unity when framed by the broader Renaissance debate over education. To be sure, The Shrew is a romantic farce; it would be a mistake to reduce the play to a simple examination of the timeworn nature vs. nurture debate. But to approach The Shrew without considering Renaissance theories of education is analogous to approaching The Tempest without taking into account Renaissance beliefs concerning magic.2 I shall argue below that, while Renaissance education theorists vigorously debated the most efficient and effective means to impart literacy and numeracy, all sides agreed that education was a complex process of socialization. Through it, the student learns to acquiesce to the prevailing social hierarchies by internalizing the dominant value system and tempering those passions that threaten social order: namely, irascibility and concupiscence. Such self-mastery enables the student to accept his or her designated role in society.3 This theory of education undergirds The Shrew's Induction and the play-within-the-play. In the context of this theory, both the on-stage lord and his courtiers and Shakespeare's audience, ranging from groundlings to court wits, might have viewed Petruchio and Kate not only as a swaggering, patriarchal boor and an Amazonian icon, but also as exempla of the educative function of mimetic art. Groundlings and wits alike in the onand off-stage audiences would have seen Kate's tantrums as a mirror of their own lack of self-control, her transformation into a submissive wife as a reflection of their potential for Renaissance versions of educated civility, and Petruchio's roughand-tumble approach to courtship and marriage as exemplary of a pedagogy that might move them from incorrigibility to civility.4 Lucentio's and Hortensio's love-in-idleness and their wooing of

An Early Reference to the Coventry Mystery Plays in Shakespeare?

one (1609 quarto; 11. 5-6). So Shakespeare's audience would presumably have felt the lewd undercurrent in Iago's use of the verb fill up. Iago's next words now take on a new meaning: Yet if you please to him off awhile, / You shall by that perceive him and his means. Again, the surface meaning is that Othello should not immediately reinstate Cassio; yet Iago surely hopes that the words hold him off, after the previous two lines, will conjure up an image in which Othello is separating Cassio bodily from Desdemona. Throughout this passage, Iago has ingeniously chosen his words so that Othello will associate Cassio's success as an officer with his supposed success as Desdemona's lover. Iago's subliminal message to Othello seems clear: if you let Cassio again have his place in the military, he will continue to cuckold you.