Decoding Dance in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night

2019 ◽  
pp. 48-82
Author(s):  
Nona Monahin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing

Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain verbal references to specific dances. Knowledge of early modern dance conventions can be of tremendous value in reading (and staging) these plays: “decoding” the dance references unveils layers of subtext that are relevant to an understanding of thematic issues and of the psychological makeup of characters, and it suggests visual ways in which scenes can be staged. This chapter examines dance references in Much Ado about Nothing and Twelfth Night, focusing on the following dances: measure, cinquepace, galliard, coranto, and passy-measures pavan. Each dance is introduced through a brief review of extant choreographic sources, after which the references are examined in the context of the scene and dramatic situation in which they occur. Finally, approaches to staging the scene are considered, with the aim of making the dance references meaningful to audiences today.

The Return from the Dead

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-175
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Dead

Chapter 5 argues for the lingering power of medieval values and imaginative forms in their relation to characters who seemingly return from the dead. Criticism has not recognized the extent of this motif in the comedies or the way that it figures in their ongoing actions as well as their endings. Among other values, return from the dead showcases the efficacy of desire on the part of those bereft and the sense of radiant new life that the revenant sometimes acquires. While this motif is usually oriented towards Shakespeare’s late romances, such as Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, it is strikingly pervasive, influential, and mysterious in the earlier comedies, as suggested by revenant characters ranging from Two Gentlemen’s Julia to All’s Well’s Helen. The chapter draws examples extensively from the comedies, including Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night. The motif lends uncanny power, emotional and intellectual depth, and memorability to Shakespearean comedy. It likewise helps us understand the persistence of medieval values into the early modern period.

‘More, I prithee, more’: Melancholy, Musical Appetite and Medical Discourse in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Iselin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Musical Event ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Many

Pierre Iselin broaches the subject of early modern music and aims at contextualising Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s most musical comedies, within the polyphony of discourses—medical, political, poetic, religious and otherwise—on appetite, music and melancholy, which circulated in early modern England. Iselin examines how these discourses interact with what the play says on music in the many commentaries contained in the dramatic text, and what music itself says in terms of the play’s poetics. Its abundant music is considered not only as ‘incidental,’ but as a sort of meta-commentary on the drama and the limits of comedy. Pinned against contemporary contexts, Twelfth Night is therefore regarded as experimenting with an aural perspective and as a play in which the genre and mode of the song, the identity and status of the addressee, and the more or less ironical distance that separates them, constantly interfere. Eventually, the author sees in this dark comedy framed by an initial and a final musical event a dramatic piece punctuated, orchestrated and eroticized by music, whose complex effects work both on the onstage and the offstage audiences. This reflection on listening and reception seems to herald an acoustic aesthetics close to that of The Tempest.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-196
Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Somatic Psychology ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.

From Messina to Delhi: Much Ado about Staging Global Shakespeares in Olympic Times

Sederi ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 57-78
Author(s):  
Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Present Article ◽  
International Performance ◽  
Royal Shakespeare Company ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The World ◽  
Performance Issues ◽  
The Uk

The present article discusses one of the contributions of the Royal Shakespeare Company to the World Shakespeare Festival, a celebration of the Bard as the world’s playwright that took place in the UK in 2012 as part of the so-called Cultural Olympiad. Iqbal Khan directed for the RSC an all-Indian production of the comedy Much Ado about Nothing that transposed the actions from early modern Messina to contemporary Delhi and presented its story of love, merry war of wits and patriarchal domination in a colourful setting that recreated a world of tradition and modernity. Received with mixed reviews that in general applauded the vibrant relocation while criticising some directorial choices, this 2012 Much Ado about Nothing in modern-day Delhi raises a number of questions about cultural ownership and Shakespeare’s international performance – issues that are particularly relevant if we see the play in relation to other productions of the World Shakespeare Festival in this Olympic year but also in the context of the increasing internationalization of Shakespeare’s cultural capital in contemporary times.

scholarly journals Shakespeare in Hawai‘i: Puritans, Missionaries, and Language Trouble in James Grant Benton’s "Twelf Nite O Wateva!", a Hawaiian Pidgin Translation of "Twelfth Night"

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (33) ◽  
pp. 57-77
Author(s):  
Rhema Hokama
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Original Play ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Class Hierarchy ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Social Privilege

In 1974, the Honolulu-based director James Grant Benton wrote and staged Twelf Nite O Wateva!, a Hawaiian pidgin translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In Benton’s translation, Malolio (Malvolio) strives to overcome his reliance on pidgin English in his efforts to ascend the Islands’ class hierarchy. In doing so, Malolio alters his native pidgin in order to sound more haole (white). Using historical models of Protestant identity and Shakespeare’s original text, Benton explores the relationship between pidgin language and social privilege in contemporary Hawai‘i. In the first part of this essay, I argue that Benton characterizes Malolio’s social aspirations against two historical moments of religious conflict and struggle: post-Reformation England and post-contact Hawai‘i. In particular, I show that Benton aligns historical caricatures of early modern puritans with cultural views of Protestant missionaries from New England who arrived in Hawai‘i beginning in the 1820s. In the essay’s second part, I demonstrate that Benton crafts Malolio’s pretentious pidgin by modeling it on Shakespeare’s own language. During his most ostentatious outbursts, Malolio’s lines consist of phrases extracted nearly verbatim from Shakespeare’s original play. In Twelf Nite, Shakespeare’s language becomes a model for speech that is inauthentic, affected, and above all, haole.

Bunster, Patricio (1924–2006)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Richard Giersdorf
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
National Culture ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Artistic Expression ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
Corporeal Awareness

Patricio Bunster’s career was emblematic of a Latin American engagement with European modernism and unique in its exchange with German modern dance (Ausdruckstanz). Trained in Chile by immigrant German members of Kurt Jooss’s company, Bunster merged a local vocabulary with globalized movements—such as modern dance vocabulary derived from Ausdruckstanz and ballet—with the goal of restructuring existing nationally defined movement. This merger was utopian in its rethinking of national culture toward a global artistic expression. Such a utopian understanding of the capacity of movement as a global unifier and transformer recalled early modern dance’s vision for a changed world through corporeal awareness and choreographed emancipation. Influenced by Laban as well as Jooss and Leeder, Bunster observed and deployed movement found in manual labor, leisure, daily rituals, nature, and the structure of architecture. In Bunster’s opinion, all of these sources carried traces of future choreographies that could express a new transnational, (Latin) American, and utopian society. Different utopian models, such as the radical rethinking of political structures through a breakdown of the barrier between art and life or the embracing of technology in relation to design for the bettering of society were at the core of modernist conviction that the world needed to be fundamentally changed.

Shakespeare for the Gifted

2000 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-253
Author(s):  
Colin Butler
Keyword(s):  
English Literature ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Teaching English ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Advanced Level ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Relative Status

This article describes a multi-part approach to Shakespeare's playwriting, including his conception of comedy, his method of characterisation, aspects of staging, and the relative status of male and female characters. It can accommodate all types of Shakespearean play. A Midsummer Night's Dream is treated as seminal. Other plays discussed include Much Ado About Nothing, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello and Twelfth Night. The approach is cumulative in effect and derives from teaching English 17–18 year olds working on the coursework unit of their Advanced Level English Literature certificate. Its unitised structure suits college and classroom workshops. It can be modified for younger students.

Comedy and Eros

2018 ◽  
pp. 280-297
Author(s):  
Judith Haber
Keyword(s):  
Same Sex ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

This essay explores the complex, destabilizing power of desire and erotic attachment in Shakespeare’s comedies, examining same-sex as well as heterosexual couplings. It considers the various forms—social, literary, and linguistic—through with eroticism is ‘comprehended’ (in all senses of the word) in the plays, including the form of comedy itself; it questions to what extent these forms are presented as adequate to contain the disruptive or amorphous desires within them. Particular attention is therefore given to the ends of plays and to issues of erotic satisfaction and closure. Focusing on formal as well as thematic and characterological expressions of eroticism allows us to complicate earlier critical assessments of such plays as The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, both of which are examined in detail here. Brief analyses are also provided of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado about Nothing.

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