Shakespeare's Stage Research Articles

“O Piteous Spectacle! O Bloody Times!”: The Faithlessness of English Identity in 1, 2, and 3 Henry VI

Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy is jam-packed with spectacle: heads are severed and made to kiss, women dress as men and lead armies, ghosts predict the future, and a plethora of miracles take place all over the various locales we visit across fifteen acts. In fact, if “faith is… the evidence of things not seen,” as asserted by the author of Hebrews, then the Henry VI plays are entirely devoid of faith, by the merit of bringing miraculous events from the realm of faith into the realm of observational knowledge. Of note, then, is the fact that the trilogy depicts Henry as a weak king whose main virtue is his commitment to his faith. Compared to other kings in Shakespearean history plays, Henry is almost-constantly referencing the spiritual world, and the world he lives in is so full of miraculous happenings that miracles themselves run the risk of becoming banal. Perhaps surprisingly, given the trilogy’s thematic investment in miracles and spirituality, the English are defined in the plays as destroying or debunking miraculous spectacles. From Gloucester outsmarting Simpcox in his feigned healing to the putting-down of two witches (Joan in 1 Henry VI and Margery Jourdain in 2 Henry VI), it seems that, despite Henry’s incredible devotion, his courtiers raise skepticism to the level of modus operandi. In this essay, I hope to examine the way that the second Henriad depicts a version of England that places logic and skepticism in the seat of faith, while its ruler’s faith is often both uninterrogated and misplaced. Shakespeare stages a teleology of spectacle that highlights English faithlessness as a source of internecine struggle and insurrection, while also cautioning against naivete in the face of canny nemeses.

"This is and is not Cressid": Seeing Double in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

Abstract: This article offers a new interpretation of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in the context of "that terrible Poetomachia " at the turn of the seventeenth century. It argues that Shakespeare stages a microcosm of the poets' war between the recently revived children's companies and the professional theater. Shakespeare appropriates conventions from the boy company repertories to defend against their caricatures of professional playing and its system of apprenticeship. Reading the play as a whole, and the character of Cressida in particular, as perspectival double images, it shows how Shakespeare uses the indeterminate body of the boy actor playing Cressida to create a visual analogy between the two and to foreground their shared dramatic situations. Through the figure of Cressida, Shakespeare metatheatrically dramatizes the vulnerability and exploitation of Elizabethan boy actors caught between warring theaters, and in doing so weaves the War of the Theaters into the Trojan War to reflect on his own contemporary theatrical market.

From the archive: Shakespeare’s stage directions, and fern fever

From the archive: Shakespeare’s stage directions, and fern fever

Suffocated mothers, stabbed sisters, drowned daughters: when women choose death on Shakespeare's stage

Women who choose death on Shakespeare’s stage often overturn ideas about tragedy as well as challenge the politics which establish which lives are worth sacrificing and which ones are not. Radically altering the relation between bios and zoe, female suicides collapse the divisions between things that grow, breathe, and love, and those things that block such living. In this essay, I draw on thinking about biopolitics along with feminist readings of Shakespeare in order to explore how characters like Goneril, Gertrude, and Juliet refuse the rules which determine how women’s blood must flow or be shed.

Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre ed. by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods

Reviewed by: Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre ed. by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods Derek Dunne Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre. Edited by Sarah Dustagheer and Gillian Woods. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017; pp. 368. Stage Directions and Shakespearean Theatre makes a welcome entrance to Shakespeare studies by bringing together editorial experience, practitioner knowledge, and theoretical chops to an elusive topic that hovers between page and stage. Indeed, it is the edited collection format that leads to such rich insights that no "monograph," with all that that prefix implies, could hope to achieve. Alongside long-time Shakespeare editors such as Terri Bourus and Suzanne Gossett, there are practiceas-research specialists like Martin White and Paul Menzer. The latter co-writes with doctoral student Jess Hamlet, while Sarah Dustagheer appears in conversation with Philip Bird, a veteran actor of the Globe stage. Such a collaborative approach models good scholarship not only through its inclusivity, but also through the holistic view that it produces of a complex theatrical riddle: In what sense can printed phrases that post-date performance be said to "direct" the stage? The book is divided into sections on taxonomy, text, editing, space, and plays, although naturally there is overlap among all of these. Throughout there is a great sensitivity to the many agents who may have a hand in the (re)production of stage directions: actors, authors, print-house staff, later editors. Tiffany Stern's opening essay gives a counter-intuitive history of the term stage direction, from a term of opprobrium used by Lewis Theobald to describe dumb shows in Shakespeare to late-nineteenth-century attempts to prescribe actors' movements. She goes on to pose the provocative question, "Are there in fact no stage directions in Shakespeare?" (40). Stern's work is complemented by Laurie Maguire's [End Page 527] wide-ranging survey of "The Boundaries of Stage Directions." Using both Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean examples, this chapter does justice to the multiplicity of directions that constantly toggle between fictional worlds and theatrical landscapes. Explaining a line like "Shift with a bag as it were full of gold on his back," Maguire takes the simple phrase as it were and shows the complex work that it does to mediate among audience, actors, characters, and later readers—"all theatre is 'as it were'" (50). The section is rounded out by Menzer and Hamlet, who discuss the difficulty of talking about early modern staging conventions, when so many stage directions are themselves unconventional. Taking one-off "nonce" stage directions like "Peter falls in a hole" or "An artificial charm of birds being heard within," they ask what is to be gained by paying attention to those unique (often non-Shakespearean) examples over the more familiar instances from the First Folio. The second section on "Text" has contributions from Emma Smith and Douglas Bruster. This may be down to reading one after the other, but Smith's argument on reading Shakespeare's stage directions as a form of free indirect discourse seems more nuanced and convincing than Bruster's take on "Shakespeare's Literary Stage Directions," which at times seeks to recover "Shakespeare's mind at work" (133). That most famous of stage directions, "Exit pursued by a Beare," becomes, in Smith's hands, "the joyfully random ursine irruption into the narrative" (113). Gossett and Bourus make up the "Editing" section, tracing the thin line that editors tread between facilitating understanding and closing off interpretation. Page design, asides, onstage deaths, and even the appearance of ghosts are all treated with the skill and sensitivity of seasoned editors, as they draw on their combined experience of editing the New Oxford Shakespeare, Norton Shakespeare, Arden Early Modern Drama, and more. Gossett's candor is to be admired when she says, "[c]onsciously or unconsciously editors assume that, given their intense familiarity with the text in question, they can envision its action better than an inexperienced reader" (147). Similarly, Bourus discusses editors being "caught between the demand for authenticity … and the demands of legibility" (172), while also toying with the literal marginality of the stage directions themselves. The section on "Space" is filled by White's discussion of indoor playing practice (including candles...

FEMALE PARTICIPATION IN THE STATE IN MUSTAPHA AND MACBETH: A HEGELIAN APPROACH

Queen
 Elizabeth’s reign informs dramatists to deal with the themes of power and
 politics in this era, since the sovereign’s gender is one of the fundamental
 social and political considerations of Elizabethan period. The English display
 an ambivalent reaction to the idea of woman ruler, as a ruler is always
 identified with masculinity. Queen Elizabeth’s reign arouses a vague anxiety
 among the English people who perceive an inherent danger within female rule. In
 this context, this study aims to analyze perception of inherent danger within female
 rule in Fulke Greville’s Mustapha
 (1594) and W. Shakespeare’s Macbeth
 (1606) by focusing on the representation of female participation in state
 affairs in the light of Hegel’s construction of the state. According to Hegel,
 nature assigns man to the state, and woman to the family; man maintains his
 power in public affairs while the woman is expected to fulfill the
 responsibility of training children to be citizens of the state rather than
 participating in public affairs. In Mustapha,
 Greville sets his play in the Ottoman state and depicts Rossa (Hurrem Sultan)
 as an ambitious, manipulative, and intriguing character. Similarly in Macbeth, Shakespeare stages Lady Macbeth
 as a power-hungry and intriguing character. Rossa (Hurrem Sultan) and Lady Macbeth’s
 preference of political to familial is depicted as unnatural by their nature
 that results in disorder for the state. This study aims to demonstrate that Greville
 and Shakespeare represent female participation in the state as a disruptive
 force in the light of Hegel’s construction of the state.

Wheresoever the Body Is: Image, Matter, and Corporeality on Shakespeare's Stage

What does the visual culture of early modern England, and the ways in which that culture articulated specific notions of corporeality, tell us about the actor’s body on Shakespeare’s stage? This article locates one answer to that question in the popular emblem books and the somewhat more rarefied cosmographical treatises of the day. Digging in these sources reveals an understanding of the body that is grounded first and foremost in corporeality – the body, before it was anything else, was matter. As such, I argue that the actor’s body on the early modern stage served as an instance of irrefutable and irreducible materiality, ‘lending’ its materiality to the abstractions and absences that Shakespeare’s theatre so readily ‘bodied forth.’However, as a wealth of scholarship on the body has suggested over the past few decades, things are not this simple. The body appears in these arenas as a very specific kind of matter, and matter itself is shown to have a complex relationship to ‘form’, or the immaterial realities of life. I argue here that the nature of the body-as-matter, and indeed of matter itself, is fruitfully understood in terms of two related early modern concepts: prima materia, and man as microcosm. These ideas were most in circulation in the distinct but kindred fields of alchemy and cosmography, and their visual manifestations offer a perspective on the theatrical body that does not reduce the body to simplematter, but still acknowledges its profound materiality, and the effect that the body-as-matter has on stage-work as a whole.

Troilus And Cressida in the Light of Day: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer

Shakespeare's changes to Chaucer's story of Troilus and Cressida are entailed by his placing it in the larger Troy story first created by Benoit de Ste. Maure. This not only compresses Chaucer's story; it turns it inside out. Chaucer's story is an indoor affair, with war and politics out of sight. On Shakespeare's stage, Chaucer's great love scene in Book Three is hidden. We only see the lovers emerging from it, exposed to common daylight. In another sort of exposure Chaucer disappears as a mediating (and defensively shading) narrator, and yet the vanished narrator's longing for and dread of the erotic returns to infect Shakespeare's Troilus, with his self-absorption and performance anxiety. Moreover, Chaucer's double image of Criseyde (beautifully vulnerable and yet troublingly in control) leads Shakespeare's Troilus to say that he has been betrayed by one who “is and is not Cressid! ” The ambivalence of Chaucer's narrator provided Shakespeare with a vehicle for expressing the erotic tensions analyzed in psychoanalytic terms by Janet Adelman. It also shadows the Troy story episodes not found in Chaucer by identifying Ulysses with the role of Chaucer's “olde bokes” that broke his heart by branding Criseyde as false.

Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre

Shakespeare's unique status has made critics reluctant to acknowledge the extent to which some of his plays are the outcome of adaptation. In Shakespeare's Stage Traffic Janet Clare re-situates Shakespeare's dramaturgy within the flourishing and competitive theatrical trade of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. She demonstrates how Shakespeare worked with materials which had already entered the dramatic tradition, and how, in the spirit of Renaissance theory, he moulded and converted them to his own use. The book challenges the critical stance that views the Shakespeare canon as essentially self-contained, moves beyond the limitations of generic studies and argues for a more conjoined critical study of early modern plays. Each chapter focuses on specific plays and examines the networks of influence, exchange and competition which characterised stage traffic between playwrights, including Marlowe, Jonson and Fletcher. Overall, the book addresses multiple perspectives relating to authorship and text, performance and reception.

Shakespeare's stage traffic: imitation, borrowing and competition in Renaissance theatre

Shakespeare's Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre, by Janet Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. 305+ xi. Hardcover. $99.00Shakespeare 's Stage Traffic starts by declaring its aim to be to explore interplay of imitation, borrowing, and competition in the ambience of Shakespeare's theatre, and is particularly interested in situating Shakespeare himself firmly within such networks of traffic and exchange rather than as any kind of unique exception-in seeing Shakespeare, in fact, as an adapter. Seeing plays as fundamentally in dialogue with each other, Clare understands the production of plays as an essentially mercantile activity. Such move is part of the Zeitgeist rather than critical revolution, but Clare is wellinformed, scholarly, and sensible, and it is after all part of her point that noth- ing is ever wholly new. Clare is particularly careful about her terms, giving nuanced accounts of borrowing, authorship, source study, intertextuality and imitation, in ways which combine to offer neat guide to the protocols and preferences of much of the current landscape of literary criticism of the early modern period, especially in the form of critical editions, although her primary aim in considering such matters is to tracje] the contribution of the often neglected pre-text to the interweaving of text, context, and performance event (24).The book has eight chapters which consider range of genres and move through Shakespeare's career in roughly chronological order. The first chapter, and the Dramaturgy of the Queen's Men, offers a close intertextual study of King John and Richard` which promises to capture something of the effect of the Shakespeare histories on members of an audience with prior experience of the plays performed by the Queen's Men (30). Despite its title there is very little Marlowe in this chapter, but Clare is insightful in her discussion of Peele, and there are some suggestive details in her argument that A True Tragedy influenced Richard III. The second chapter, Deposing Kings, reads Richard II in relation to Edward II and Woodstock. Of course there are issues of dating at stake here, and Clare's strategy for bypassing them is uncharacteristically disingenuous: ?Whether Woodstock was composed and performed in the 1590s; or written in the 1590s and revised in the 1600s, before Richard II; or written and revised in the 1600s, following Richard II, is in sense incidental' (63). The third chapter relates The Shrew to A Shrew and The Comedy of Errors to the wider context of the Gesta Grayorum as whole. argues that A Shrew is independent of The Shrew, though here again Clare has to be bit gung-ho about questions of dating, declaring It is preferable surely to jettison these vexed questions of derivation and listen, instead, to the dialogue between texts (99), which comes dangerously close to that old bread-and-butter exercise of compare and contrast. …

Free Will: Art and Power on Shakespeare's Stage by Richard Wilson

Free Will: Art and Power on Shakespeare's Stage by Richard Wilson

Not Making a Movie: The Livecasting of Shakespeare Stage Productions by The Royal National Theatre and The Royal Shakespeare Company

This article explores the tension between the announced transparency and the actual intermediality in the live broadcasts of Shakespeare stage productions by the Royal National Theatre (NT Live 2009-) and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC Live 2013-). While often seen in terms of the practical achievements of reach and access, the broadcasts do not merely reproduce or transmit the stage production to the remote cinema audience, but rather adapt the stage productions on which they are based. I give attention to the process of making the livecasts to situate these intermedial adaptations in their material conditions of production. The apparent transparency obscures the significant creative and technical intervention that the broadcasts make in the live event. The fluent film grammar in the broadcasts, which offers the cinema audience a dynamic, shifting point of view, may account for a market research finding suggesting audiences for the broadcasts found them significantly more engaging than did audiences who saw the same stage production live in the theater. The broadcasts make a complex negotiation with liveness which depends in part on the conditions of reception. The cinema audience’s experience of liveness depends on the livecasting theater companies’ decision-making in determining the conditions of production and reception just as much as temporal co-presence with the live event.

Mental Tempests, Seas of Trouble: The Perturbations of Shakespeare’s Pericles

This essay considers how two early modern commonplaces, the “sea of troubles” and the “tempest of the mind,” helped to sustain the period’s exploration of human subjectivity--of the experience of suffering, in particular. While the former trope depicts the human subject as tossed by tumultuous waves, the latter takes the subject to be the source of tempest and tumult. The polyvalent maritime storm, through which selfhood is imagined as both water-tossed and water-like, asks whether it is possible to be a pragmatic agent while remaining at the mercy of emotion. The question is investigated at length in Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” a drama about a father who suffers at sea and a daughter who belongs mysteriously to it. The conceptual metaphors binding mind and water are borne out at length by the play’s central characters, both of whom comprehend themselves and their adversities in relation to the sea: Pericles’s self-allegorizing emerges as a counterpoint to unmanageable inward passions, and Marina combats the sordid realities of a shoreline underworld by fashioning a mythology of sea-birth. Shakespeare stages the fluidity with which human beings own and disown their perturbations—a fluidity apparently inscribed in the most intuitive oceanic commonplaces of the English Renaissance.

“[A]ction may / Conveniently the rest convey:” Shakespeare and the Stage Translation of Gower

This paper explores the self-consciousness of Shakespeare's stage adaptation of Gower's Confessio de Amantis, showing that Pericles, like Shakespeare's other romances, is explicitly concerned with the relationship between narrative and enactment. Rather than disparage written romance in comparison to performed story, Shakespeare in Pericles proposes performance as the completion and fulfilment of the tales books begin. Within the play, Marina's virtue-inspiring verbal performances argue for the transformational power of spoken poetry, while in the liminal space between the play and the audience, the poet Gower, “stand[ing] in the gaps to tell the stages of [the] story”, confirms the benevolent unity of narrative and performance.

셰익스피어 무대와 스크린 경계 넘기: NT Live와 돈마웨어하우스 <코리올라누스>

This paper gives accounts of the beginning of the relationship between Shakespeare stage and screen in the context of history, and of NT Live as an innovative programme of using satellite technology to broadcast real-time footage of stage performances to screens of cinemas around the world, then of the Donma Warehouse production of Coriolanus as an example of open dialogue crossing boundaries between performances on theatre stage and on cinema screen. NT Live programme has solved a long-standing problem that there is not enough cinema in the theatre, while that there is not enough theatre in the cinema. Its success has brought celebrities to perform a Shakespeare character, and Tom Hiddleston is an exemplary case, who is widely known for his role as Loki in the Thor and Avengers series. His Coriolanus becomes a Coriolanus who contends with looking like Hiddleston-Loki, and adopts the coping mechanism to do with his character. The production’s publicity is dominated by a photograph of Hiddleston as Coriolanus, thereby what the production reveals consistently is the Hiddleston-Loki-Coriolanus association. This association, however, does not make Shakespeare subservient to the star actor’s fame, but stimulates the latter to use his glamour to illuminate the former: what makes the actor popular is Shakespeare’s popularity. It offers a new kind of interpretation, that is, a customized production in accordance with a certain form of popular culture appealing to the audience’s needs and desires.

The Italian Taylor and His Boy or what Robert Armin did to Straparola

AbstractRobert Armin is well known as the last of Shakespeare's great stage clowns, the actor who inspired the creation of characters like Touchstone, Feste and Lavatch in Shakespeare's plays. He is less known as a pamphleteer, poet and playwright, despite the fact that he seems to have been quite productive in his time. This paper analyses in particular one of his most neglected works, entitled The Italian Taylor and His Boy (1609) in relation to its source, a novella of the collection ‘Le Piacevoli Notti’ [The Pleasant Nights'] (two volumes, 1550‐1553) by the Italian author Giovan Francesco Straparola. First, I give reasons for Armin's choice, arguing that the story of Maestro Lattanzio and Dionigi might have attracted the actor's attention for its points in common with his own life. Then, I show how Armin does not produce a mere ‘translation’ of Straparola, as has sometimes been implied, but he improves the source in many ways: changing the finale and adding to the text a captivating dramatic quality, refined imagery, learned allusions and references to his own background. Finally, I consider the literary and intellectual context that influenced the writing of the poem.

Shakespeare's Feet: Puns, Metre, Meaning

AbstractThis essay attempts to explain one of Shakespeare's strangest stage directions, at the end of Coriolanus. To do so, it looks at one of Shakespeare's most‐used puns: the way a ‘foot’ can be an anatomical foot or a prosodic foot. In Shakespeare's writing, this punning relationship between anatomical and prosodic feet speeds or slows verse, characterises personages like Iago, and even rescues poetry from the ravages of time. The reason, it transpires, this pun works so well in Shakespeare's writing is that it speaks to the ways in which metre operates in a manner akin to pun: prising multiple interpretations from words in order to prize them.

JANET CLARE. Shakespeare's Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre.

JANET CLARE. Shakespeare's Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre.

Writing Woodstock: The Prehistory of Richard II and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Method

Writing Woodstock: The Prehistory of <i>Richard II</i> and Shakespeare’s Dramatic Method

Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare OnlyShakespeare Only. Jeffrey Knapp. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xvi+238.

<i>Jeffrey Knapp</i>, Shakespeare Only<i>Shakespeare Only</i>. Jeffrey Knapp. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xvi+238.