Shakespeare's Stage Research Articles

Feeling Dreams in Romeo and Juliet

AbstractThis essay treats the close relationship between sensation and dreaming in Romeo and Juliet. In a play where a sterile and restrictive social language is far removed from the facts of inner life, Shakespeare introduces a startling alignment of cognitive understanding and felt experience through the many dream descriptions and visions that appear in his play. Making use of Epicurean and Renaissance theories of dream and enriching them, Shakespeare stages the hidden closeness of thought and feeling: dreams show us a fundamental state of being in which every mental representation is anchored temporally on either side by physical experience. In dreams, thinking arises from an event in the physical and perceptual realm, and results in the coming into being of another physical and perceptual event. This structure of felt experience bracketing imagined or abstract experience becomes the model for love and a life lived in accordance with the inner structure of perception in Romeo and Juliet, a model which...

“False Friends”: Affective Semantics in Shakespeare

This essay argues that often the most apparently familiar language and concepts relating to emotions were understood in earlier times differently, sometimes radically so. David Crystal borrows from comparative semantics the term “false friends” (faux amis) to describe “words in a language which seem familiar but are not”. After analysing a selection of words used by Shakespeare related to affect, such as emotion, temper, happy, sad, amazement and others, a fuller examination of the word passion is provided. Rhetorical training further complicates the issue of the simulation and stimulation of emotions on Shakespeare's stage.

Shakespeare's Great Stage of Fools (review)

Robert H. Bell. Great Stage of Fools. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 186. $80.00. Robert Bell's study, Great Stage of Fools, undertakes the ambitious goal of exploring the virtues, wisdom, value, and limitations of and so-called foolosophy (Thomas Chaloner's coinage in his 1549 translation of Praise of Folly and frequently used throughout by the author here) over the course of career. Altogether, this book aims to cover a tremendous amount of ground in just 138 pages of text (with another forty-eight of notes and bibliography), and the results, though mostly admirable and certainly successful in the final three chapters, can be hit or miss. In the end, however, Bell's thoughtful and provocative work is well worth the lively read. This study dissects four kinds of folly (3) embodied or enacted in turn by 1) clowns and jesters, 2) opponents of 3) comic and/or romantic protagonists, and 4) tragic heroes. After a brief introductory chapter evoking the example of the slippery doubleness of Erasmus's fool Moria in Praise of Folly and invoking the New Critical approach of William Empson, chapter 2 describes foolery from Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Dromios in Comedy of Errors, Bottom and Puck in Midsummer Night's Dream, and Dogberry in Much Ado through Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and Lavatch and Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well. Chapter 3 recounts the longstanding, conventional take on the dialectical drama staged by Falstaff, Shakespeare's greatest apostle of folly, and the purported madcap Prince Hal, reforming apostate from folly (3). If the first three chapters, therefore, largely sample fools and clowns and familiar interpretations of them, the last three chapters offer insightful, excellent, focused new readings. Chapter 4, for instance, adroitly considers the limitations of fooling practiced by lovers with fool affinities in Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. Chapter 5 then shrewdly examines four posing anatomists and would-be scourges of folly--Mercutio, Jacques, Malvolio, and Thersites--each character more unpleasant than the last. Finally, chapter 6 explores the subtleties of five tragic incarnations who play the fool in different ways: Romeo, Richard II, Hamlet, Lear, and Othello. Both the considerable virtues and the occasional flaws of the work are encapsulated by a frank, self-revelatory account in the introductory chapter where Bell reports: Teaching Shakespeare for the first time, I was asked why a fool carries a 'glass. I was the symbolic implications of an hourglass when my student objected: 'The footnote says the glass is a mirror.' Flustered, I responded, 'Well, it just goes to show that you can't believe everything you read.' 'Or hear!' the student declared (4). Bell goes on to detail ably what he would now, as a seasoned teacher, ask and explain (4). In this work, then, readers will indeed encounter the lively mind and personality of a dynamic, award-winning teacher of Shakespeare at Williams College since 1972, and that is surely saying much. On the downside, the very same kind of confidently explaining remains, having crystallized into seemingly authoritative truisms, and there sometimes therefore recurs the sanguine tendency not to question his own readings while either not engaging with or casting doubt on other critics (e.g., his handling of Marjorie Garber's interpretation of Orlando in As You Like It on p. 67), save for recurring hallowed voices like the humanist Erasmus, the venerable Shakespearean critics William Empson and Harold Bloom, the poet Robert Frost, the philosopher Henri Bergson, and the modernist James Joyce. This tendency leads to the notable low points in this study, which I, albeit with regret, simply cannot pass over in silence. One of these appears in Bell's oversimplified, inaccurate treatment of Shakespearean clown Will Kemp: Kemp cultivated a special relationship with spectators who might have seen him before the show, he mustered a crowd and collected tickets. …

Shakespeare's great stage of fools

Motley to the View Follies of Identity: A Midsummer Night's Dream Fool's Two Bodies: The Henriad Feigning & Fooling in As You Like It Foolery shines everywhere: Twelfth Night Fate of Folly: Much Ado About Nothing Scourges of Folly Motley Tales and Strange Bedfellows Unconsidered Trifles: A Fool's Horn Book

“A spirit to resist” and Female Eloquence in The Tamer Tamed

Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed offers a witty and intricate response to Petruccio's wife-taming strategies in The Taming of the Shrew. I argue that this response engages centrally with questions about the soul–body relationship at stake in gender struggle – both as Shakespeare stages that struggle and as Fletcher re-imagines it. Katherine's failed insistence on her “spirit to resist” in The Taming of the Shrew is an important but overlooked point of departure for the persistent emphasis that Fletcher's triumphant Maria places on her wilful soul in Tamer. In a battle for power with her misogynistic new husband, Maria employs rhetoric to mark a rigid divide between her body and mind, forcing Petruccio to engage with her intellectually despite his default mode to engage with her physically. Conversely, she also uses rhetoric that confuses the line between soul and body when it assists her in trumping Petruccio's public insults. Fletcher's compelling staging of women overcoming men through rhetorical skill progressively challenges the notion of a male monopoly on intellectual debate secured through the widespread exclusion of women from formal training in rhetoric. In The Tamer Tamed, rhetoric makes it possible for female characters to insist on having it both ways, that is, to align women with the (superior) soul and men with the (inferior) body, and yet assign positive value to women's bodies. This possibility radically exposes more conventional, negative views of women's bodies and the pervasive association of women with bodies as themselves mere rhetorical constructs mobilized to subordinate women – rhetorical constructs that can easily be met with new, anti-misogynistic ones.

“When Golden Time Convents”: Twelfth Night and Shakespeare's Eastern Promise

At the British Museum's Shah Abbas exhibition quotations from Twelfth Night reassured visitors Shakespeare was as familiar with ‘the Sophy’ as with Elizabeth. One of four dedicated to empire and globalization, the show used Shakespeare's ‘universalism’ in the debate about ownership of cultural property, to illustrate director Neil MacGregor's idea of the museum as ‘the world under one roof’. But critics of the series object that an emphasis on ‘the food of love’ effaces Islamic or Aztec violence, and by taking the quotations out of context curators also elided religious conflict in Elizabethan England. They ignored the way references to the Shirley brothers in Twelfth Night encode Catholic plots to exploit the Shah for Essex and King James. But a Tate Gallery Van Dyck exhibition showed Robert Shirley in his silk suit as ‘fencer to the Sophy’ and Persian ambassador to Rome; and it is this complexity that Shakespeare stages in his Epiphany play, with its hope for ‘golden time’ but suspense that like Robert's ambiguous suit from Abbas, ‘What's to come is still unsure’.

« When Golden Time Convents » Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise

At the British Museum’s Shah Abbas exhibition quotations from Twelfth Night reassured visitors Shakespeare was as familiar with ‘the Sophy’ as with Elizabeth. But critics of the show objected that an emphasis on ‘the food of love’ effaces Islamic violence, and by taking the quotations out of context curators also elided religious conflict in Elizabethan England. They ignored the way references to the Sherley brothers in Twelfth Night encode Catholic plots to exploit the Shah for Essex and King James. But a Tate Gallery Van Dyck exhibition showed Robert Sherley in his silk suit as ‘fencer to the Sophy’ and Persian ambassador to Rome; and it is this complexity that Shakespeare stages in his Epiphany play, with its hope for ‘golden time’ but suspense that like Robert’s ambiguous suit from Abbas, ‘What’s to come is still unsure’.

Dramatic Function of the Chorus in Henry the Fifth

Shakespeare opens every act of his Henry the Fifth with chorus. This is quite unusual in his whole corpus, except Pericles. The chorus in Henry the Fifth does not merely function as a commentator on the dramatic action, but also narrates the main historical events of the play. However, in its narration and reading of main dramatic events, it is very selective in order to foreground Henry's heroic achievements as a warlord. The chorus emphasizes its limit of re-presentation of Henry's heroism on the stage. By admitting the physical insufficiency of the stage to contain the epic grandeur of a history play, the chorus appeals to the audience's sympathetic imagination to make up its limits. The heroic sublime is a Shakespearean strategy to make his audience participate in the critical appreciation of English historical events. Shakespeare's stage is a cauldron into which he puts 'the materials of English chronicles and historical narratives and reshuffles them to his dramatic plot. This Shakespearean re-forming of English history is analogous to the audience's creative and critical re-experience of their past. The chorus in the play incessantly tries to set up Henry as the national hero similar to William the Conqueror. In this sense the chorus stands in for the royalist view of English history. However, the discrepancy between the chorus's narration and dramatic action on the stage shows its partiality and even its distortion of historical significance. The traditional interpretation of the chorus's function was to equate it with Shakespeare the historian in his conservative support of the Tudor myth. This reading is proved wrong in the paper. The chorus ironically cancels and self-consumes its heroic image of Henry by appealing directly to the audience's imagination. The chorus always frustrates the expectations of the tantalized audience: the latter rather experiences painful bodily presence and national disunity disrupting a single and unified nation proclaimed by the chorus. The selective partiality of the chorus in the narration is implicitly juxtaposed with the historiography as a narrative emplotment. The audience experiences history as a story on the stage. Shakespeare's re-presentation of history is both re-forming and re-reading of it at once. He is sceptical and subversive of the Tudor myth, since he puts the whole English history of his dramatization in a hermeneutical circle which makes it refract and reflect itself.

Shakespeare and Childhood (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and Childhood Jennifer A. Munroe (bio) Shakespeare and Childhood. Edited by Kate Chedgzoy, Suzanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Of the many oft-cited quotes from Shakespeare's plays, few, if any, are about children. Yet a new collection of essays reminds us that Shakespeare's plays portrayed issues relevant to childhood, and children were ready participants on the early modern stage. Rather than simply looking at the way the plays represent children from the perspective of adults, the essays in this collection seek to rediscover the children themselves, from Shakespeare's day to today. This collection will be a useful resource not just to Shakespearean scholars, but also to scholars of childhood and children's literature more broadly as it illuminates the "historical origins and contexts of Shakespearean childhoods and their continuing history of cultural reinvention" (6). Divided into two parts, the volume looks at children first in the context of Shakespeare's day and then from the eighteenth century onward. The first part addresses "the questions of what being a child might have meant, both to children, and to adult others, and of how these meanings were reflected, constructed and negotiated by children both as the subjects and the agents of fictional, theatrical and poetic representation" (6). The second part of the book "addresses the cultural history of the relationship between Shakespeare(s) and childhood(s) from a period spanning the eighteenth century to the present" (7). As the first part of the volume promises to remember that children were (and are) not simply smaller versions of adults, we find various approaches to recovering examples of actual children represented on the early modern stage. Catherine Belsey looks at how the young princes of Richard III, whose voices still echo in the pages of literature and history books as they do in the halls of the Tower of London, are shown to exercise some measure of agency and independence, despite their early death at the hands of their uncle. Two essays examine relationships between parents and children in Shakespeare: Hattie Fletcher and Marianne Novy's essay looks at father-child identification, especially that between fathers and daughters, while Patricia Phillippy concentrates on "child-loss" in the Sonnets, focusing on "competing claims to the possession and importance of sons and daughters" in Shakespeare's poems (97). Rounding out the first part of the volume, A. J. Piesse and Lucy Munro both seek to understand how children in Shakespeare's plays work through issues of developing masculine [End Page 86] identity. For Piesse, the child on Shakespeare's stage is a transitional figure, bearing the signs on his (and we might remember that there were no girls, just as there were no women, on the early modern stage) body of the man he would become; thus, the "Shakespearean child figure is a carrier of culture between the generations" (77). Munro's essay similarly considers how boy actors (and child characters in plays) in Coriolanus figured in liminal ways and illustrated how childhood and adulthood are both performative and how these children were "impersonating" a kind of "hypermasculinity" (92). The second part of the volume moves forward in time, with essays that consider Shakespeare's children (and the children who read the plays and saw them performed on the stage) from the eighteenth century and Victorian era to today's 'tween culture. As Suzanne Greenhalgh's introduction to the second part explains, Shakespeare's plays influenced shifting cultural definitions of "proper" childhood, as Shakespeare has been inherited from one generation to the next as the cultural epitome of "good" literature to which adults and children alike should aspire (120). The essays in the second part of the volume, therefore, "do not merely seek to document the relationship between Shakespeare and childhood but to acknowledge and explore the many ways in which Shakespeare has existed within changing cultures of childhood" (120–21). The essays in the second part of the volume address how children understood and used Shakespeare's plays, increasingly so after the early modern period came to a close. Naomi Miller, like Kate Chedgzoy, considers how children used Shakespeare's plays in subversive ways...

Shakespeare's Books: Reading Dumb Eloquence and Speaking Breasts

This paper is about the book in Shakespeare's plays; the book as an object, wherein the article may disclose narratives, corroborate stories, expose versions of reality and perspectives of presence; and the semiotic of the book, wherein the language of the book, of holding, touching, turning leaves, opening pages, reading, revealing and closing may simulate an idea of the body or mind in motion. This article is about how the metaphorical and material book appears on Shakespeare's stage, and how the physical and figurative presence of the book challenge the imaginative and representational conditions of Elizabethan theatre.

Mutability and Division on Shakespeare's Stage by Yu Jin Ko

Mutability and Division on Shakespeare's Stage by Yu Jin Ko

Arthur's Fall

Arthur's fatal fall from his prison wall is a crucial moment in Shakespeare's King John. Rejecting other historical accounts of Arthur's death, Shakespeare chose this most theatrically compelling and technically difficult version, aiming to shock the audience without injuring the boy actor. Modern productions of King John may resort to stylized representations of the event, with descents of a mere step standing for the fall, or with actual leaps made safe by unidentified figures who catch the falling boy. Other performances use technology-assisted illusion to create the appearance of a dangerous fall and of Arthur's body onstage, where his dying words are required. But how did Shakespeare stage Arthur's fall? One otherwise gratuitous detail of Arthur's speech-his ship-boy disguise-holds a clue. The conventional image of the ship-boy included an identifying length of rope carried over his shoulder. An Elizabethan Arthur could have used that "prop" to begin his descent from above, reducing the distance of his fall, while still making an audience gasp in surprise when, suddenly losing his grip, he falls. King John's onstage death seems to confirm this hypothesis by deliberately recalling the iconography of Arthur's fall, in the king's metaphorical comparison of his body to a ship's rigging. The connection is reinforced when the same nautical rope metaphor is continued immediately in a speech delivered over John's body, by the boy actor who now plays the dead king's son Prince Henry, but who earlier had fallen to his death as Arthur.

"The Dark Backward and Abysm of Time": The Tempest and Memory

This essay examines The Tempest in light of models of memory derived from cognitive psychology, sociology, and philosophy, placed within the context of early modern debates about the nature and locus of memory. In The Tempest, Shakespeare stages profound tensions between an individualist, faculty-based model of memory in which the mind is figured as a "cell" bounded by a monodic subject, and the constant threats to such order and control on the part of other minds represented in the play. Attention to the tensions between control and disorder in memory, allows us to understand three critical cruces of the play: 1) Prospero's apparently unmotivated demand for Miranda's attention during the exposition of 1.2; 2) the destruction of the masque by a moment of forgetting, and the subsequent agitation caused; 3) the play's own apparent amnesia about the founding narrative recounted by Prospero, as Alonso increasingly displaces Antonio as the play goes on.

Short Shrift: Religion and Materialist Criticism

AbstractThis review essay examines the upsurge of materialist criticism in Renaissance literary studies over the last 20 years as well as the limitations of such criticism vis‐à‐vis religion. Sensitive to these limitations, two recent authors employ solid historical scholarship to uncover the mundane realities as well as the no less real, though harder to quantify, spiritual aspects of Renaissance religious practice. Ramie Targoff's Common Prayer (2001) examines the Reformation production and distribution of the Book of Common Prayer, paying special attention to how the reformers balanced both economic and devotional considerations. Second, Jeffrey Knapp's Shakespeare's Tribe (2002) challenges the prevailing view in contemporary scholarship that Shakespeare's stage was largely secularist, even secularizing. Knapp argues that a considerable amount of early modern drama, including Shakespeare's, was written with the sacramental purposes of uniting religious believers of various stripes and of illustrating by example on the stage many of the precepts of the religious life. Knapp specifically counters materialist accounts in which religion is either a mask for power politics or is simply eviscerated of its spiritual content by representing it on an allegedly profane stage. Implicit in Knapp's argument is the odd coupling of Puritan antitheatricalists such as Philip Stubbes and Anthony Munday with some current scholars who rely heavily on Puritan polemics as an accurate characterization of the Renaissance stage. Finally, I cite Stephen Greenblatt's biography, Will in the World (2004), for its reiteration of the claim that Shakespeare was a secular playwright who invoked the language and trappings of religion merely for comic, commercial entertainment; I suggest that the plays can be read in a more devotional light.

Seeing Things ("As They Are"): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance

1 COLERIDGE IS NOT BEST KNOWN AS A PLAYWRIGHT, OR EVEN AS A THEORIST of the stage, in spite of his sustained critical assessment of late eighteenth-century theater--itself familiar to readers chiefly through his lectures on Shakespeare (this is to gesture toward the alleged anti-theatricality of his general position). Nevertheless, Coleridge did make serious attempts to write plays, largely, it seems, in response to the abysmal state of English drama in the 1790s, as it was then perceived not only by Coleridge but by other public commentators as well, such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Contemporary plays were often dismissed as sentimental, gothic, formulaic, and highly melodramatic--or, as Wordsworth famously declared in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, sickly and stupid german tragedies. These comments need to be understood in terms of highly idealized sense of what theater could accomplish, in political as well as dramatic terms. To reinvigorate the productions of the English stage would be not only to elevate it again to the level of its golden age, in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, but to fulfill an agenda related to nationalist impulse that, if not explicitly revolutionary, was politically reformist. (1) Thus the familiar narrative of Coleridge's involvement in the theater begins with his early radicalism (evident in so much of his work in the 1790s, not least in his 1797 play Osorio, and in The Fall of Robespierre, co-written with Robert Southey), and with sense of the theater as an ideal space not only to represent and engage current events (chiefly of course the French Revolution and the English reaction to it, and with it, issues of freedom and censorship), but also to educate the public response to those events. On the other hand, the political ambivalence of Coleridge's maturity, and the critical pronouncements he would later make on the state of the theater, did nothing to counter the general sense that highbrow Romantic theater was either fixated unproductively on old models (classical or Shakespearean), or obsessed by subjects that were fundamentally unsuitable for the stage--fit only for the closet, or specimens of what Byron was to call mental theater. (2) It is in this loosely-sketched context, though, that we may now consider the following event. In 1813, Coleridge's play Remorse, highly successful revision of his 1797 play Osorio, was performed to considerable acclaim, and ran for nearly three weeks at Drury Lane. As far and away the most financially rewarding production of Coleridge's career (he is thought to have made 400 pounds out of it), this turn of events was remarkable enough. But more remarkable still, though rarely mentioned in discussions of Coleridge's theory of dramatic illusion, is how play, written by such an adamant critic of Georgian stage-craft could unreservedly accept and deploy its conventions. (3) The paradox here draws from Coleridge's assertion that while Shakespeare's stage was effectively bare--merely a naked room, blanket for curtain--his appeal to the imagination fitted it out as 'A field for monarchs.' (4) Theater productions of Coleridge's day, on the other hand, including those of Shakespeare's plays, appealed not to the imagination, but to the senses, through an emphasis on visual display and special effects, and were thus deemed inappropriate not only for Shakespeare's genius, but for any serious drama. Meanwhile, the 1813 production of Coleridge's own play, at the newly rebuilt Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was state of the art: the theater itself had been re-equipped with the latest in lighting and stage technology, and for Remorse, there were to be lavish sets and startling effects, in keeping with the kind of exotic popular fashion created by Byron's Eastern tales (Holmes 321, 325). The play may have been vilified by many critics for its awkward emphasis on description in place of action (what we might construe as an emphasis on the written over the visual) and for its attendant abstractions, but it was unanimously appreciated for its stage effects, and particularly for the coup d'oeil of the famous sorcery scene. …

Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage (review)

Journal Article Carol Chillington Rutter. Enter the Body: Women and representation on Shakespeare’s stage. Get access Enter the Body: Women and representation on Shakespeare’s stage. By Carol Chillington RUTTER. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Illus. Pp. xxii + 218. $100.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Theodora A. Jankowski Theodora A. Jankowski Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 1, Spring 2003, Pages 107–109, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2003.0055 Published: 01 April 2003

Shakespeare's Genders, Then and Now

Book Review| May 01 2002 Shakespeare's Genders, Then and Now Shakespeare and Masculinity by Bruce R. Smith 2000: Oxford University PressEnter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage by Carol Chillington Rutter 2000: Routledge Jonathan Shandell Jonathan Shandell Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Theater (2002) 32 (2): 82–84. https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-32-2-82 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jonathan Shandell; Shakespeare's Genders, Then and Now. Theater 1 May 2002; 32 (2): 82–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-32-2-82 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTheater Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2002 by Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage (review)

Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage (review)

Enter the Body: Woman and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage

Enter the Body: Woman and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage

Enter the Body: Woman and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage

1University of Stirling Enter the Body: Woman and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage Carol ChillingtonRutter xxi + 218London and New YorkRoutledge 2000Paperback£15.99 0‐415‐14164‐8