Shakespeare Contemporaries Research Articles

:The Moor in English Renaissance Drama

D'Amico writes that when he lived in Lebanon and Morocco he taught plays such as Othello students who, no doubt, would have been considered Moors by Shakespeare's contemporaries. His experience as an outsider trying to understand another culture shapes this work about the boundaries of perception set by race, religion and custom and about the boundaries of the imagination. From his authoritative reading of five plays of Shakespeare, and others by Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Dekker, D'Amico explores the relationship between Western society and the inmage of the Moor as an African and as a follower of Islam. Moor as villain becomes a convenient locus for those darkly subversive forces that threaten European society from within but that can be projected onto the outsider, he writes. destructive forces of lust and violence are thus distanced by being identified with a cultural, religious or racial source of evil. The plays reveal to him the way culture and imagination determine values and standards of judgement. What struck him most in his investigation, he says, is how great writers move beyond cultural stereotypes and are able to examine the human problems found in a figure such as the Moor. In Shakespeare's work, especially, what is projected onto the Moor reflects those desires that come from within. Aaron's question Is black so base a hue? posed in Titus Andronicus pervades the book. From D'Amico's historical account of contacts in trade and diplomacy between England and Morocco, to his discussion of ELizabethan and Jacobean drama, this work should appeal to all scholars of the Renaissance.

Shakespeare's Mastiff Comedy

CCASIONALLY IN HIS CAREER AS PLAYWRIGHT, William Shakespeare availed himself of the materials of his rivals in the business of public entertainment. Notoriously, Robert Greene's accusation of 1592 that there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers . . . [who] is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey seems to suggest that Shakespeare had helped himself too freely to others' work and, worse still, had thereby flown higher than they.' Shakespeare's indebtedness to predecessors and contemporaries for everything from plots to phrases is by now well attested in a body of criticism that, unlike Greene, celebrates Shakespeare's conceit. In this essay I will explore Shakespeare's appropriation of the materials of a different sort of rival tradition: neither Marlowe's mighty line nor the prose of chronicle history; neither Kyd's revenge-plotting nor ecclesiastical ritual; but rather the symbolic energies of his professional neighbors, the bears and dogs of Bankside. For Shakespeare's contemporaries, bearbaiting and theater were culturally isomorphic events.2 From the architecture that housed them to the ordinances that inhibited them, the spectacles were considered analogous-if not, to their opponents, identical in their depravity. After a brief assessment of bearbaiting and its geographical and cultural position in Shakespeare's London, I will explore, in this reddish light, the play in which I think Shakespeare uses the sport's bloody routines most intricately, both to illuminate the psychology and relationships of his characters and to explore the dramatic medium itself: Twelfth Night, or What You Will.3

Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery by Robert Ornstein

Reviews91 this reason other works than Shakespeare's at the time simply omitted the wife in vignettes of the perfect family. Francis Bacon in his New Atlantis (1627) makes the mother invisible; when her function is alluded to, she is shown as hidden behind a screen while the father and children reign over the state. Thus the father's claim to obedience is emphasized by simply omitting the wife. Thus also birth is absorbed by the male who usurps human fecundity as his. The return of daughters to the kings in the last plays gifts them with the values that females carry, but in a nubile, procreative, yet conciliatory and obliging form, unlike the kinds of forces an adult woman (wife) might introduce. Williamson further shows how Shakespeare reverts to pastoral models with providential natural settings in which to mythologize power structures such as the father in charge of the family. James' emphasis on the king's two bodies underlies this pattern too. The sovereign body is asexual and reproduces asexually like the Phoenix. Thus Pericles first (before the mother) finds Marina on stage as does Leontes his daughter. Williamson explicates many other patterns too; I only touch above on the ones most fascinating to me. This is a critical and academic book that deserves lay reading. Shakespeare is universal to the education of the young in Western culture and is often taught as the ultimate portrayal of the universal human condition. The power of his language and certain tragic/cosmic themes seem to confirm this premise. But Shakespeare was as culture-bound as anyone else, and Williamson's book discloses the often ugly patriarchal substructure to plots and genre choice. Williamson's book is so thoroughly grounded in the history and sociology of Shakespeare 's time and current psychoanalytical theory that her theories are both far-reaching, substantial, and in my opinion almost wholly accurate. I think her book will become definitive, a classic in the criticism on Shakespeare's last plays. The book hurts. It may be ahead of its time. For those of us who have reached middle age with a comfortable view of Shakespeare's last plays as reflecting the aged bard's love of the natural cycles in the cosmos, Williamson's book is jolting but convincing. It renders dark truths. STEPHANIE DEMETRAKOPOULOS Western Michigan University Robert Ornstein. Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1986. Pp. 265. $34.50. I think this book's virtues are, on the other side, its limitations, though the latter are surely relative to the biases of the beholder. Allow, then, this beholder to put forth his biases: a metadramatic scholar, increasingly given to performance criticism, I also work as a director for the stage. Here, in seventeen chapters, fifteen of them devoted to as many of Shakespeare's comedies (with The Merry Wives of Windsor excluded), Ornstein in a highly rational prose style, always judicious, sometimes elegant, keeps his eye mostly on the texts of the plays. Concerned with the form of the comedies, which he defines as essentially closed and there- 92Comparative Drama by offering the reader an "emotional and aesthetic satisfaction" (p. 248), he talks about the characters and their dramatic worlds in general psychological terms, far short of those more psychoanalytic. There is little room here for what the actor would call the character's "sub-text." There are brief references to actual performances, some thoughts on the characters as they might appear on the stage (usually signaled by phrases such as "flesh and blood"), and illuminating comparisons with Shakespeare 's contemporaries: for example, LyIy would have ended Love's Labor's Lost with a noble denunciation of desire. Yet, for the most part, Ornstein brings his good sense to what he thinks we can say about the play as deduced from its language, and therefore, as he observes in a fine concluding chapter, in a way consistent both with Shakespeare's intentions and, equally, with the "congruity" of Shakespeare criticism over the centuries. The latter, while revealing "often radical . . . disagreements about a handful of characters," also "testifies to the essential clarity and wholeness of Shakespeare's...

Shakespearean Tragedy: Genre, Tradition, and Change in "Antony and Cleopatra"

By showing us how Shakespeare's contemporaries were likely to read the presentation of human nature, which they saw as inherently self-deceiving, this critical inquiry enables us to unravel the complexities of Shakespeare's characterizations in a manner that will be invaluable to Shakespeare specialists, critical theorists, students, performers, and anyone who seeks an enhanced understanding of Shakespeare's tragedies and their characters.

Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece

A ROUND 1601 GABRIEL HARVEY, WRITING IN THE MARGIN of his copy of Chaucer, remarked that Shakespeare's Lucrece, and his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them, to please wiser sort. His remark suggests that The Rape of Lucrece helped establish Shakespeare's seriousness as a poet, a suggestion borne out by popularity of poem in its own time and enthusiastic praise it received from many of Shakespeare's contemporaries.1 The Rape of Lucrece has fared less well at hands of modem critics, however, who persistently object to its elaborate rhetoric. Action in Lucrece is smothered in poetry, Richard Wilbur complains. Douglas Bush deplores poem's incessant conceits and endless digressions; Ian Donaldson way the poem repeatedly begins to analyse nature of a moral predicament, only to break off abruptly, diverting us into an extended metaphor, lament, or topical digression. J. W. Lever surmises that the opportunities for conscious eloquence tempted Shakespeare's facility and led to a piling up of tropes. Even Copp6lia Kahn, who argues convincingly for significance of some of poem's major concerns, sees rhetorical setpieces as distracting from the poem's insistent concern with relationship between sex and power. 2 For all five critics, rhetoric of The Rape of Lucrece conceals, confuses, overwhelms. In this essay I shall explore decorum of poetic language in The Rape of Lucrece. I shall argue that both protagonists construe particular metaphors as if they were literally true, drawing apparently unwarranted conclusions from them, and that narrative voice

The Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief 16th-Century Contemporaries: An Index

The Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief 16th-Century Contemporaries: An Index

The Two Hells of Doctor Faustus: a Theatrical Polyphony

The first article in the first issue of the original TQ was a piece by Jan Knott, utilizing the concept of the absurd as a means of understanding Greek tragedy. Recently, his essays, of which many first appeared in TQ, have been published in a new collection, The Theatre of Essence, from Northwestern University Press. Kott's idiosyncratic approach to the interpretation of theatre texts continues to distinguish him as one of those rare literary critics whose insights illuminate the play in production – the reflection in the Brook–Scofield King Lear of his Beckettian interpretation in the seminal Shakespeare Our Contemporary being just the most famous instance. Now Jan Kott, who teaches at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, turns to the world of Shakespeare's own contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, and examines Doctor Faustus as the meeting-place of many kinds of Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan theatre, contributing to an understanding of the play that is rooted not in a dead theology but in a living theatricality.

The Role of the Audience In Shakespeare's Richard II

IT IS A COMMONPLACE THAT SHAKESPEARE PRESENTS in Richard II a conflict between two contrasting worlds-the static, picturesque, ceremonial world Richard's medieval court and the active, modern, practical world Bolingbroke and his successors. The corollary this proposition-that the audience in Shakespeare's theatre must shift its perspective during the course the play, sometimes taking a long, historical view the action and sometimes seeing it as insistent, present reality-has not been so well developed, and yet believe it is at least as important to our understanding the ways the play works. History in Richard II is presented to the audience in two diametrically opposed ways. In many scenes, it appears just as Richard says it would, as a quaint period piece, a tale of woeful ages long ago betid (V.i.42).' This is the view that is often remarked in discussions the play's formal, ritualistic quality. But history is also presented in Richard II as current action, a living process that directly involves and implicates the audience in the theatre. Queen Elizabeth's often-quoted comment, I am Richard II, know ye not that?; the suppression the deposition scene during her lifetime; the fact that Essex's followers saw fit to sponsor a performance Richard II on the afternoon before their rebellion-all these things indicate that for Shakespeare's contemporaries this play was not simply an exercise in historical recreation or nostalgia. Thus, in addition to the long, historical view that Tillyard and many his successors have remarked,2 Richard II also provided its original audience with the immediate involvement that Elizabeth's comment and the rebels' sponsorship imply. From the historical perspective, the members the audience are spectators, contemplating the action from a distance but not involved in it. But in much the play we, the audience, become participants, directly involved along with the characters on stage. The rebels in Richard's England enlist us in their dangerous enterprise: we share in their fatal choices and participate in their crimes and errors. Finally, Shakespeare provides us with a third perspective on the action-a

The Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief 16th-Century Contemporaries: An Index

The Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief 16th-Century Contemporaries: An Index

Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus

Shakespearean drama provides the history of ideas with no better exposition of the classical, medieval, and Renaissance metaphor of the body politic than Menenius' fable of the belly in the first scene of Coriolanus.' It is quite possible to put oneself in the position in which Menenius would put the Roman plebeians, taking his organic analogy for a dramatic as well as a political exemplum, and to read Coriolanus as the tragic failure of the Roman state to live up to its own organic ideal. In The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays, James E. Phillips, Jr. writes, If . .. we take Menenius's speech on the belly as a key to the political structure and action of the play, we can see immediately that this is not the tragedy of a ruler alone or of a people alone, but a picture of the threatened disintegration of an institution including and yet superior to them both-the state.2 Part of the problem with such an approach, which takes a dramatic excerpt as evidence of some Renaissance political deep structure, is that it tends to neglect the political context of Shakespeare's play. Phillips does trace a complex history of theoretical discussion of the organic state all the way back to Aristotle's Politics, but the Jacobean state was clearly not unified around a universally accepted organic analogy during the Midlands Corn Insurrections of 1607, and recent historical criticism has persuasively argued the parallels between the rebellions of Shakespeare's contemporaries and of his Roman plebeians.3 But further, even the formal textual analysis produced by such an approach tends to ignore Shakespeare's own specifically dramatic consideration of the contradictions within the organic analogy. Insisting as he does that Shakespeare's play merely translates a logically unified and nearly universal Renaissance world view, Phillips himself practices a sort of organicism which denies that literature can examine a conflict between political and literary institutions; not the least of the reductions of such criticism is its suppression of literature's analysis of its own political and generic

The Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief Seventeenth-Century Contemporaries: George Chapman, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, John Marston, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton: An Index

The Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief Seventeenth-Century Contemporaries: George Chapman, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, John Marston, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton: An Index

A Bibliographical Guide to Shakespeare's Contemporaries

A Bibliographical Guide to Shakespeare's Contemporaries

Index to the Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief Seventeenth-Century Contemporaries: Chapman, Heywood, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Tourneur, Middleton

Index to the Figurative Language of the Tragedies of Shakespeare's Chief Seventeenth-Century Contemporaries: Chapman, Heywood, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Tourneur, Middleton

The Jewel-Harding Controversy

I cannot oucrslipp some without manifest iniury. that descrue to haue their names enrolled in the first rancke of valiant Confuters: worthy men, but subiect to imperfections, to errour. to mutual reproofe; some more, some lesse, as the manner is. Harding, and lewell, were our Aeschines, and Demosthenes: and scarsely any language in the Christian world, hath affoorded a payre of aduersaries, equiualent to Harding, and lewell; two thundring and lightning Oratours in Jiuinity.These words, occuring as they do in Gabriel Harvey's Pierces Supererogation (1593), cannot but sound strange to modern ears. The language is, of course, somewhat peculiar, as we might expect from a contemporary of Shakespeare's, and in particular from so pedantic a writer as Gabriel Harvey. But apart from that, the reference of his words—with their apparently exaggerated praise—seems oddly misplaced. If he had spoken of More and Tyndale, or even of Whitgift and Cartwright, his praise might have appeared more intelligible. But who today has heard of Jewel or Harding, at least in terms of literature? Neither of them receives so much as a mention in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, or even in Baugh's voluminous Literary History of England, no doubt because they are regarded as belonging to a brief episode in ecclesiastical history. Yet Harvey speaks of them, in openly literary terms, as “two thundring and lightning Oratours in diuinity,” and even dares to compare them with the great Athenian orators, Aeschines and Demosthenes. So the question arises: Was he merely deluding himself with a spirit of exaggeration—a spirit not unknown in Shakespeare's England? Or was he, after all, recording a widespread feeling among Shakespeare's contemporaries which has somehow vanished like a bubble on the river of time?

John Minsheu: Scholar or Charlatan?

John Minsheu, Shakespeare's contemporary, is primarily known as the author of id est, Ductor in Linguas, The Guide into Tongues (London, 1617). More than any other English work of the period the Ductor in Linguas reflects linguistic research and speculation at home and abroad and represents an important link in the beginnings of modern English lexicography. On the basis of this work Minsheu has been praised as a scholar, antiquarian, and etymologist of note.

Shakespeare's Contemporaries

Shakespeare's Contemporaries

Seasons and Flowers in The Winter's Tale

FTER centuries of comparative neglect by critics The Winter's gA99) Tale has luckily been found congenial to the twentieth-century sensibility. Modern writers have seen rich intellectual issues in the play: Wilson Knight the concept of nature, S. L. Bethell the theological issue of grace and the themes of country and court, Derek Traversi the movement toward penitence and grace, and F. David Hoeniger the notions of rebirth and fertility implied in the seasonal motif.1 This last approach in particular fits quite well with the play's title. But the reader of Mr. Hoeniger's penetrating article may justly wonder what Shakespeare's play was like before The Golden Bough was written; on that account it is worth re-examining the seasonal and floral motifs of the play from a pre-Frazerian viewpoint to see what Shakespeare's contemporaries would have made of a tale about winter and spring garnished with a pastoral bouquet. The Renaissance needed to look no further back than the Middle Ages for lore concerning the seasons. To gain an idea of this surviving medieval tradition we can turn to a work which Perdita's father might very appropriately have kept at his bedside, The Kalender of Shepardes, an almanac and handbook for farmers which was reprinted many times throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This manual divides man's 72-year life expectancy into four equal periods analogous to the seasons, which themselves fall into three-month periods beginning with February. The course of man's life parallels the course of the year: "So is deuyded man in to foure parties, as to youth, strength, wysedome, and age.. ."' February is early childhood, and by April "the earth and the threes [sic] is couered in grene and flowers, and in euery partye goodes encreaseth habundauntly, then commeth the chylde to gather the swete flowers of hardynes... ." June is the prime of life: "when man is xxxvi. yere, he may ascend no more, for then hath nature gyuen hym beauty and strengthe, at the full, and rypeth the sedes of parfyte vnderstandynge." By October he must make his peace with God: "And also the labourers soweth newe sedes in the earth, for the yere to come. And then he that soweth nought, shal nought gather. And then in there [sic] other vi. yeres a man shal take him selfe vnto God for to do penaunce and good 1G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (Oxford, I947); S. L. Bethell, The Winter's Tale: A Study (London, n.d.); Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (London, I954); F. David Hoeniger, "The Meaning of The Winter's Tale", UTQ, XX (Oct. i950), II-26. 2Here Beginneth the Kalender of Shepardes Newly Augmented and Corrected (London, T. Este, [I570?]), sig. A7. Compare Thomas Tusser, Fiue hundreth pointes of good Husbandrie (London, I590), p. 54: "The yeare I compare, as I find for a truth, / the spring vnto childhood, the summer to youth: / The Haruest to manhood, the winter to age, / all quicklie forgot, as a play on the stage."

Antony and Cleopatra and the Subjective Convention

A major sortie in what Maxwell Anderson has called Bernard Shaw's “furious critical assault on the romantic theatre” is the section entitled “Better than Shakespear?” in the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans. Well-known today, this discussion offers proof of Eric Bentley's assertion that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism should be judged as polemic rather than criticism of a more objective sort. Shaw's attack in that Preface on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has naturally been a principal object of critical attention ever since it was penned, but this fact should not blind us to another, that Shaw was at least as much concerned with Antony and Cleopatra, and that in fact his own comedy, as one scholar pointed out more than a generation ago, was more of a counterblast to Antony than to Caesar. It is easy to forget that Shaw followed the lead of certain of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries in re-introducing Cleopatra into a play about Caesar (whom he called “this greatest of all protagonists”) whereas Shakespeare keeps the two rigorously separate. Shaw's purpose in doing what he did was clear, and this purpose is explicated in detail in his comments on Shakespeare's Antony.

The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors.

The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors.

Providence in Shakespeare's Yorkist Plays

LMOST every serious dramatist in our culture has had, to some extent, to wrestle with the doctrine of providence, but the difficulties were particularly explicit for the Elizabethans. From the apparent absence of justice in this world, Machiavellians and Epicureans (probably largely imaginary opponents, but still requiring to be answered) were deducing that all things roll and run at a venture, and that there is no other cause of good and evill of this life, but either fortune or els the will of ;1 and several Elizabethan playwrights were content to explain the accidents of life by either or both of these causes. It would appear, however, that Shakespeare was not one of these. An idea about providence is an idea about drama, and the increasing complexity and profundity evident in Shakespeare's way of organizing and depicting events in life are, fairly obviously, related to a deepening of his understanding of the springs and purposes of life. The foundations of this dramatic technique are laid, with considerable care and some subtlety, in the four plays dealing with the rise and fall of the House of York,2 and reveal a conception of providence which, though it has no startling originality, represents, to my mind, an inclination towards a theology more satisfying than that of many of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The distinctive features of the conception of providence that emerges from these early histories may be demonstrated more easily by first considering a crude version of the doctrine of providence that was commonly held at the time. Most Elizabethans agreed that, if control of life was attributed wholly to man or to Fortune or the stars, then, as John Chamber put it, may have an everlasting playing day and let the world wag.3 But there were many moralists to whom faith and a reading of the Old Testament suggested that God's working day was largely occupied with the distribution of thunderbolts, fire from heaven, earthquakes, and other acts of God (as they are still called in our insurance policies). And by a not altogether unreasonable extension of the argument, these moralists often went on, in the manner of the comforters of Job, to interpret any apparently accidental disaster that befell a sinner as an instance of divine vengeance and, hence, as a demonstration of the truth of divine providence. This conception, though it had the advantage of being easy to ap-