Shakespeare Canon Research Articles

‘Send the midwife’: The Birth of Blackness in Titus Andronicus

AbstractThis article examines a neglected context for understanding the ontology and epistemology of race in Shakespeare's drama: the role of the midwife. Early modern midwives performed an important cultural function by not only assisting women in labour, but also pronouncing the sex and paternity of a newborn. As Caroline Bicks has shown, this was a time when a midwife was thought to have significant influence over how a body was literally shaped and interpreted at the moment of its birth, thereby determining its reception in the community. Nowhere in Shakespeare's canon is the midwife's authority more manifest – and threatening – than in Titus Andronicus, where the midwife's role includes establishing an infant's race. After Tamora, Empress of Rome, delivers a baby fathered by her lover, Aaron ‘the Moor’, he asks: ‘How many saw the child?’ By subsequently killing the birth attendants, Aaron calls attention to how controlling the destiny of his son will depend upon rewriting the script of his nativity. Merging critical interest in early modern childbirth with Shakespeare scholarship on race and performance, I show how newly born bodies are midwived into racialized subjects, illuminating how midwifery discourses can broaden our understanding of early modern racecraft. My specific claim is that the statements made by Tamora's nurse concerning Aaron's ‘black’ son can be read as a performative utterance that confers, constitutes and attempts to naturalize the newborn's raced identity.

Rival monarchs: The two versions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI

Two early plays in the Shakespeare canon, 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI, exist in widely different versions. For many years, the standard explanation for the discrepancy was that Contention and True Tragedie were untrustworthy texts contaminated by memorial reconstruction. In this essay, I will argue that each needs to be treated in its own terms as an internally consistent play; that anomalies in the text of Contention and True Tragedie are not convincing evidence of memorial reconstruction; and that significant differences in the alternative versions can best be explained as revision and expansion, rather than as abridgement.

Shakespeare Disintegrated: Authoriality, Textuality, Co-Authorship, Biography

The article explores one of the most assiduously researched topics in Shakespeare criticism: that of the ways in which Shakespeare’s responsibility as author of the plays that traditionally bear his name has been established. Rehearsing the major contributions to this debate (from the mid-nineteenth-century idea that Shakespeare’s plays were the work of a group of intellectuals, to recent tendencies in attribution studies which dismember the canon on the basis of theories of co-authorship and collaboration), it maintains that one of the most persistent tendencies in the debate has been that of disintegration; and that both the dismembering of the canon as a whole and the amputating of parts of it as collaboratively written have had the paradoxical effect of de-authorialising what are conventionally known as ‘Shakespeare’s plays’.Not simply meant as a historical survey, the article also highlights the fact that, as well as determining effects on the Shakespeare canon, disintegrative tendencies have inspired theories of the text relevant to the construction of authorial identity, and have also generated a fallout on the idea, expressed by bibliographers and textual scholars, that the composition and configuration of texts are inescapably collaborative. Finally, the article maintains that biography too has been affected by a notion of disintegration which insists on a de-personalised subject and the idea that a life, no less than a text, is a socially-composed construct.
 John Faed, 'Shakespeare and the King's Men' (1851). Public Domain

Whitewashing white permanence: The (dis)/(re)membering of white corporeality in early modern England

AbstractIn early modern English drama, black flesh is remarkable. In the Shakespeare canon, the visibly black flesh of the eponymous Moor of Venice in Othello and the villainous Aaron in Titus Andronicus has been the subject of scholarly analysis for centuries. Yet, in a field that has placed so much emphasis on flesh marked by color, unmarked flesh is imbued with assumptions of whiteness that make unremarkable, a privilege that renders it unthought and uncritiqued, processes that contribute to the normativity of whiteness as inextricable from subjectivity. This rhetoric of whiteness as largely unremarkable continues to influence our modern conceptualizations of what Shakespeare looks like both in our minds and on the stage. Too often, modern productions of Shakespeare engage in casting practices that elide important early modern identity distinctions in service of contemporary white supremacy. For instance, national identity—the difference between being English, Irish, Scottish, French, etc—mattered both for character and actor on the Early Modern English stage. Yet, these distinctions fade into the fringes of memory when casting today's productions, allowing directors to include and exclude bodies based on modern conceptions of racial difference and mis‐remembering of whiteness as a coherent and stable early modern identity. But whiteness was neither so stable nor so stoic in Shakespeare's day or in the works of Shakespeare as our modern theatrical culture continually mis‐remembers and re‐performs. This essay engages with the ways in which the modern theatre mis‐remembers Shakespeare in relation to whiteness to reinforce white supremacy. This essay uses contemporary theories of Afro‐Pessimism and Black Critical Theory to destabilize the mythology of white permanence that undergirds Renaissance history. I argue that the notions of the stable white corporeal whole that scholars and artists assume of the majority of Shakespeare's characters requires an anachronistic reading of whiteness that is the product of chattel slavery and a paradigm that relies on the destruction of black flesh for the unified white body to gain corporeal coherence. The essay concludes with a critique of epistemology arguing that this forgetting of the historical dismemberment of white flesh makes us mis‐remember the role of whiteness in our present.

Shakespeare's Canon

This essay is concerned with how Shakespeare himself might have thought about a canon. What for him were the books that, to use A. S. Byatt’s phrase, “every writer had to know in order to know who they are”? One part of that question is easy: the books that every grammar school boy had beaten into him: Livy, Virgil, Ovid, Horace and so on. But how does a writer of his time, and, for that matter, of his calibre, negotiate their legacy?

Venus and Adonis The Rape of Lucrece, and the Shakespeare Canon

This essay revisits one of the oldest topics of Shakespeare criticism: the relation between Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the plays. From Charles Gildon forward, critics see the narrative poems as a "promise" of the plays. This critical template, however, puts history backward: Venus and Lucrece become linear promises of an art that does not exist. The critical template also endorses the faulty paradigm underwriting Shakespeare criticism: the poems are the product of a "man of the theater." William Shakespeare was a man of the theater, but he was also a print poet who saw five poems published during his lifetime: Venus (1593), Lucrece (1594), "The Phoenix and Turtle" (1601), Sonnets (1609), and A Lover's Complaint (1609). In particular, Venus and Lucrece invaluably record a fiction of their role in Shakespeare's dramatic canon. In turn, the plays record a fiction of the performance of the printed poems. By revising the received wisdom, we may introduce a more accurate map of Shakespeare's literary career. This map preserves the integrity of a developing Shakespeare canon of poems and plays, and it recognizes that the poems gesture to the plays and the plays to the poems. To support this argument, the essay features evidence from Shakespeare's own canon fictions: intratextual moments in the poems and plays that record a narrative about the structure of his career. Yet other evidence emerges: from the narrative poems' genre, minor epic; from a neglected canon topos emerging from antiquity, "great things and small"; from the poems' reception history; and from both biography and bibliography. Venus and Lucrece are not simply commercially driven works produced in a youthful moment of dramatic inactivity; they are types of generic form and literary character in a remarkably structured canon on page and stage. As Shakespeare gets ready to retire, he presents his canon in Cymbeline in just this way. In the end, we may view Venus and Lucrece as integral to his dramatic career, at once fountains and foundations for comedy, history, tragedy, and romance.

“No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity”: Compassion and the Nonhuman in Richard III

When Lady Anne accuses Richard of cruelty in the wooing scene of act one in Richard III, she claims that even the fiercest beast will demonstrate some degree of pity. Her attempt to categorize Richard as somehow both less than human and less than a beast, however, leaves her vulnerable to Richard’s pithy retort that he knows no pity “and therefore [is] no beast” (1:2:71-2). The dialogue swiftly moves on, but the relation between the emotional phenomenon known as pity or compassion and the nonhuman, briefly raised in these two lines, remains unresolved. Recent scholarship at the intersection of early modern studies, historical animal studies and posthumanism has demonstrated ways in which the human-animal binary is often less than clearly articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Building on such work, and adding perspectives from the history of the emotions, I look closely at the exchange between Anne and Richard as characteristic of pre-Cartesian confusion about the emotional disposition—in particular compassion—of animals. I argue that such confusion can in fact be traced throughout Richard III and elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon and that paying attention to it unsettles the more familiar notion of compassion as a human species distinction and offers a new way to read the early modern nonhuman.

"Then their heirs may prosper while mine bleeds": Legal Renege, Witnessing, and Child Corpses in Two Lamentable Tragedies and A Yorkshire Tragedy

There has been a great deal of scholarly focus on the children of William Shakespeare’s plays, where violence to their bodies interrogate history, inheritance, and political ascension. Attending to the drama of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, however, reveals that the staging of children also emphasized the stakes of oath breaking, legal renege, and violence to children within non-royal families. This article examines the didactic legal possibilities of early modern English drama outside the Inns of Court tradition and Shakespearean canon. I examine two early seventeenth-century domestic tragedies that dramatize violent child murders: Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601) and Thomas Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608). The domestic space occupied by both sets of caregivers and children illustrates the effects of crime on the community, the difficulties of law enforcement, and the early modern justice system broadly. I suggest the implied executions of the failed caregivers and their pre-death lamentations stage the legal repercussions of oath-breaking and child violence. Through a combination of rhetorical and performance strategies, these texts implicate playgoers as witnesses to child-murder, interrogating assumptions about the extent that the law can protect children.

«Come muovermi nel mio corpo da uomo»: il corpo maschile travestito nel teatro inglese, dai ragazzi attori a Caryl Churchill

Among the many traditions of cross-dressing in performing practices, English Renaissance theatre plays a central symbolic role, especially considering the Shakespearean canon; however, only through the disruptive reading of gender and queer studies Shakespeare’s theatre has been studied as a transvestite theatre in which all female parts were played by boy actors. This article intends to show how this transvestite body opens a diachronic perspective on those theatrical practices of the second half of the twentieth century that rediscover the Elizabethan stage as a locus of artifice. Renaissance and twentieth-century theatre thus share the transvestite male body, not following a linear dynamic of model and imitation, but in a much more complex interweaving of echoes and returns. Through an analysis of two works by the playwright Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (1979) and A Mouthful of Birds (1986), the essay explores the transvestite male body as a place of dialogue between the Shakespearean and the contemporary scene, which share effeminacy -here understood as the staging of femininity on a male body- as a detonator for a wider crisis of binary categories.

Terms of Engagement: Keywords of Identity, Race, and Human Mobility in Early Modern England

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on current research on keywords of identity and difference in early modern England, and draws attention particularly to the etymological oscillation of guest and host, stranger-friend and stranger-enemy, in Indian incarnations of The Comedy of Errors. It argues that the preoccupations of the original play with the unsettling, uneasy reciprocity of guests and hosts, strangers and friends, becomes an internal, structural trope for Indian negotiations with the Shakespearean canon itself.

Introduction: Character Beyond Shakespeare

Introduction:Character Beyond Shakespeare Harry Newman (bio) The rise of "new character criticism" is a new chapter in a long story of love and loathing in Shakespeare and early modern English literary studies. Depending on one's perspective, character's recent "comeback" might seem like the final scene of a revenge tragedy, the redemptive end to a prodigal son tale, the refrain in a circuitous poem, or even the revelation of a psychodrama in which "we . . . have ineluctably been character critics all along, though in various states of being closeted" (Yachnin and Slights 1; Ko 8). The last two decades have seen a surge of rich studies that look at character, interiority, and personation in early modern English literature, drawing on the fields of gender, sexuality, and trans studies,1 critical race studies,2 disability studies,3 law,4 Reformation theology,5 animal studies,6 the history of emotions and senses,7 cognitive science,8 linguistic pragmatics,9 the history of authorship and literary culture,10 and ethics and philosophy.11 Responsive to formalist, materialist, and poststructuralist critiques of character as a category of analysis across the twentieth century, new character criticism is more theoretically aware, more interdisciplinary, and more historically conscious than the "old" character criticism of A. C. Bradley and his followers.12 Yet for the most part, an intense focus remains on Shakespeare and his dramatis personae. When discussed, "non-Shakespearean" character and characterization tend to be judged according to enduring "Shakespearean" models of interiority, individuation, and psychological depth. Investigations into the historical development and cultural relevance of character continue to fixate on ground broken and genres dominated by Shakespeare. Character critics rarely look beyond drama, or indeed beyond solo-authored plays, and are usually more [End Page 1] concerned with Shakespeare's exceptionality than his place in a collaborative and intertextual culture of characterological experimentation across a range of genres and media. This special issue brings together six essays that push debates about character beyond the Shakespeare canon, and beyond the priorities and concerns of Shakespeare-centric character criticism, putting "Shakespearean" models and paradigms in dialogue with "non-Shakespearean" ones, and even challenging the Shakespearean / non-Shakespearean binary. It engages with a variety of authors, genres, texts, and practices, many of which have been marginalized in scholarship, in order to expand our understanding of the role of character, personhood, and identity formation in early modern English culture, and to diversify the aims and methodologies of new character criticism. Collectively, the essays in the issue take this opportunity to address a wider range of genres than are traditionally considered (not just drama but also character sketches, prose fiction, elegy, epic, allegory, and life-writing) and to broaden the historical period of enquiry (ranging in focus from the 1580s to the 1680s). They make new and provocative arguments about imitation and style, performance and rhetoric, genre and form, emotional affect, authorship, literary history, and the role of theory. In doing this work, the articles historicize and theorize character with attention to cultural forms and shifts whose relevance has not been properly recognized, including social mobility and urbanization (Fallon), the meme as a unit of cultural transmission (Williams), pedagogic exercises (Olson), accounting methods (Myers), and early news culture (Newman). While literary in focus, the articles cross disciplinary boundaries, engaging with—among other fields and disciplines—anthropology, social history, the digital humanities, book history, and visual culture studies. The articles pay particular attention to the relationship between literature and culture, and share interests in cultural transmission and transaction. In this introduction, I survey and evaluate the state of the field and its critical heritage, exploring what is at stake in moving beyond the methods and preoccupations of a Shakespeare-centric character criticism in early modern studies. The introduction then ends with an overview of the articles in the issue. This special issue is by no means exhaustive. There is important further research to be done in areas not addressed at length here, most notably the rich and varied characterization practices of early modern women writers,13 and the role of race and racialization in early modern ideas about character. Despite the surreptitious white gatekeeping of character and inwardness since their...

Challenging Hegemonic Patriarchy

Drawing on feminist theory, this article offers a feminist reading of some Arab Hamlet appropriations to demonstrate whether or not such plays qualify as feminist Shakespeare re-visions. It shows how some female characters in these plays have been, unlike their Shakespearean counterparts, empowered to challenge the hegemonic patriarchal structures of their societies while others remain oppressed and submissive. The discussed Arab Shakespeare renditions constitute only illustrative samples of heroic and oppressed women in the Arab Shakespeare canon which has been known for producing political satires. The featured plays include Ahmad Shawqī’s Masra‘ Kileopatrā (The Fall of Cleopatra), Egypt, 1946; Nabyl Lahlou’s Ophelia Is Not Dead, Morocco, 1968; Mamdūh Al-ʻUdwān’s Hamlet Wakes Up Late, Syria, 1976; Yūsuf Al-Sāyyegh’s Desdemona, Iraq, 1989; Jawād Al-Assadī’s Forget Hamlet, Iraq, 1994; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Palestine, 2011.

Accents and Original Pronunciation as Tools for Teaching and Performing Shakespeare in South Africa

In multicultural and multilingual South Africa, recent initiatives to decolonise curricula have suggested dispensing with the works of Shakespeare and other ‘Western’ texts to make space for African and postcolonial texts. The elevated and archaic language of classical texts often proves difficult for students to access comprehensively and discourages their interest or engagement. This article gives an account of the author’s interventions in the field of Theatre and Performance, and specifically vocal pedagogy, to tackle the language conundrum and therefore to broaden entry into and to invigorate Shakespeare’s plays. The study of Original Pronunciation (OP) is proposed as a means of ‘levelling the playing field’. In the project described, characters from the Shakespearean canon are chosen as possibly representative of individual students’ cultural backgrounds; then key speeches are translated into students’ first/home languages, spoken in the accents of those languages, shared and discussed before an engagement with the sounds of OP. The project culminates in a production and an analysis of how the language shifts described can increase access to, and understanding of, text. The article concludes that the exploration of accents and OP in studying Shakespeare’s works proves an invaluable tool.

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

<i>Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594</i>. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

Friendly fire: Shakespeare's accidental enemies, a review of the Shakespeare authorship controversy

AbstractSome might consider Shakespeare authorship heretics (sometimes called “anti‐Stratfordians”) to be enemies of the author Shakespeare. However, as a Shakespeare authorship dissident myself, I will offer a different and possibly counterintuitive perspective on the topic of “Shakespeare's Enemies.” Namely, that it is mainstream Shakespeare scholars who inadvertently undermine our understanding of the author Shakespeare and prevent us from making vital connections between the works and their true author. They are not enemies of the works of Shakespeare, of course, but unintentional “enemies” of our search for the truth about the author of those works. A core unexamined assumption of the traditional theory is that early references to “Shakespeare” were indisputably references to Shakespeare of Stratford, despite recent scholarship that demonstrates his Elizabethan era was a golden age of pen names and other forms of anonymous authorship. Circular thinking and other manifestations of groupthink follow in the wake of this foundational assumption. I will summarize some of the abundant evidence pointing to Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, as the actual author of the Shakespeare canon.

The unbearable whiteness of being (in) Shakespeare

What happens to the critical work of scholars, teachers, and performers of Shakespeare if we take very seriously the whiteness of our author and the critical epistemologies that develop and contour the body of his corpus? How is such work affected by the BIPOC identities of these scholars, teachers, and performers? In this essay I consider these questions through a sustained critique of Shakespeare’s whiteness and the whiteness of the critical gaze that has been directed at Shakespearean canon. My essay is subtended by the personal, which is an important facet of the confessional mode being considered, interrogated, and recapitulated in this issue. My confession, to which I turn at the close of this essay, rehearses a pedagogical experience wherein the wages of whiteness exact their usual cost from me and my students, demanding that we yield to white practices of knowledge-making in Shakespeare.

“A place i’th’ story”. Narrative, meaning and identity in Antony and Cleopatra

Antony and Cleopatra is one of several plays in the Shakespearean canon that evince a particularly acute interest in the role played by narrative in giving shape and significance to experience and contributing to the formation of individual identity. Not only does the drama situate itself within a matrix of pre-existent literary narratives which frequently diverge from one another in the interpretations they give to events, but the major characters within it tend to define themselves in relation to stories of mythological origin which are also often highly ambivalent in their implications. While dramatizing the mechanisms through which the various kinds of story in which the individual’s sense of self is vested are elaborated, Shakespeare’s play also illustrates some of the ways in which these narratives can come into collision with one another to the detriment of a selfhood constructed by such means.

Whose Hamlet Mocks the Warm Clown?

Whose Hamlet Mocks the Warm Clown?

“My Little Body is Aweary of this Great World”: The Decline of Portia

ABSTRACT Although her role is the fourth largest female part in the Shakespeare canon and the largest role in The Merchant of Venice, Portia has been consistently under-represented in the twenty-first century both creatively and critically. This article aims to understand the decline of Portia from Victorian icon to Post-Modern cypher and argues that her shifting fortunes are directly linked to the challenges and societal change brought about by feminism. While considering all genres, the article makes specific reference to novelizations of Merchant by Mary Cowden Clarke, Alan Isler, Erica Jong, Grace Tiffany, and Howard Jacobson for supporting evidence. Focusing on what is not being adapted and why, Portia’s neglect is something that begs analysis whilst offering great scope for re-appraisal in the era of fourth-wave feminism.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest Revisited: Nietzsche and the Myth of the New World

Abstract The Tempest is the only play in the Shakespearean canon that is open to a purely “Americanist” reading. Although Prospero’s island is located somewhere in the Mediterranean, numerous critics claimed that it deals with the New World (Hulme &amp; Sherman 2000: 171). The paper revisits the existing interpretations, focusing on the turbulent relationship between Prospero and other inhabitants of the island: Caliban, Miranda, and Ariel. In the article I propose a rereading of their relation in the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism, utilising Nietzsche’s key philosophical concepts like the Apollonian/Dionysian elements and der Übermensch (the overman). In his vast canon, Nietzsche refers to Native Americans only once and in passing. However, his call for the revaluation of all values seems to be an apt point of departure for a discussion on early colonial relations. Nietzsche’s perspectivism enables to reread both the early colonial encounters and character relations on Shakespeare’s island. Hence, in an attempt at a “combined analysis”, the paper looks at Prospero as the potential overman and also offers a reading of the English source texts that document early encounters between the English and native inhabitants of North America (Walter Raleigh, Richard Hakluyt, Thomas Harriot, Robert Gray).