Philomela’s Marks

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Wells
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Poetic Representation ◽  
Rape Of Lucrece

This essay explores the significance of the mutual imbrication of ekphrasis and sexual violence in Shakespeare’s poetry. Beginning with a discussion of Philomela’s substitution of a woven picture (the teasingly opaque ‘purpureas notas’) for an oral account of violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I analyse Shakespeare’s revision of this foundational story in Titus Andronicus. Arguing that in Shakespeare’s work ekphrasis functions as a gendered site of contestation between image and word in which the feminine image is organized and contained by the masculine ‘noting’ of an artist figure, I consider how Shakespeare’s other extensive use of the Philomela story in Cymbeline clarifies this pattern. My final texts, The Rape of Lucrece and The Winter’s Tale, allow me to unpack more fully the function of ekphasis in drawing attention to the predication of poetic representation on the abjection of the female body.

Body Politics and the Non-Sovereign Exception in Titus Andronicus and the Winter’s Tale

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Physical Condition ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
Performing Objects

This chapter looks at The Winter’s Tale and Titus Andronicus to show how Shakespeare’s aesthetics integrates performing objects and performing bodies in its depiction of powerful women. In staging the process of survival for Lavinia and Hermione, Shakespeare travesties the concept of the king’s two bodies central to early modern sovereignty, redistributing agency between subjects to objects. Central to the argument about the female body in these two plays is Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of corporeal femininity, which emphasizes the tactility of the performing body, its agitating power that poses problems for the way these plays and their critics attempt to make sense of the women’s physical condition as an embodiment of fractured or incomplete subjectivity. Julie Taymor’s film Titus (2000), with its cinematic expression of the power of the prosthetic, becomes a touchstone for a reading of the play’s exploration of the politics of vibrant matter. Both Lavinia and Hermione offer a form of corporeal feminism, exemplified in Taymor’s film. In their parody of sovereignty’s charismatic survival beyond death, these two plays to different degrees transform political theology into a feminist politics in which performing objects—Lavinia’s body and Hermione’s statue—evoke the phenomenon of non-sovereign agency that limits sovereign absolutism and enables fugitive politics in Shakespeare.

Flights of Fancy and the Dissolution of Shakespearean Space-Time in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-105
Author(s):  
Kate Myers
Keyword(s):  
Space Time ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Patriarchal Ideology ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

While much attention has been paid to Angela Carter’s intertextual appropriation of Shakespeare and her interrogation of the patriarchal ideology at work in his representations of familial strife, critics tend to focus on Carter’s final novel, Wise Children. Shakespeare’s influence on Carter’s earlier novel, Nights at the Circus, has gone largely unremarked. Like Wise Children, Nights at the Circus builds a bricolage of Shakespearean allusions, but it more subtly reconsiders the ontological issues of legitimacy by returning to Shakespeare’s interest in ambiguity, in deniability, in time, and in space. I argue that Nights at the Circus appropriates and shatters Shakespeare’s disruptive methods concerning the materiality of time in The Winter’s Tale and Hamlet. In so doing, Carter reverses time and dismembers space to criticise the masculine-made-legitimate at the expense of the feminine, which Shakespeare’s temporal and spatial manipulations ultimately uphold.

Shakespeare’s Pharmacy

2018 ◽  
pp. 101-151
Author(s):  
Eric Langley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Pharmaceutical Medicine ◽  
King Lear ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Titus Andronicus

Part II of my study introduces sympathy’s attendant oppositional force, antipathy, and consequently Chapters 3 and 4 are both informed by early-modern scientific conceptions of pharmaceutical medicine, wherein the same bittersweet drug can have both medicinal and poisonous (or sympathetic and antipathetic) capacity; this pharmaceutical metaphor is shown to widely inform Shakespeare’s drama, both at the level of genre, plot, and character, and, more significantly for my study, at the level of word, where language itself is repeatedly described as operating with the force of the Platonic pharmakon. Communication is shown to have the capacity both to cure and to kill, leaving the Shakespearean subject caught up among indeterminable influences, beset by malign attendants, infectious carriers, sickly sympathizers, and ill communicators. Chapter 3 explores a number of plays—including The Winter’s Tale, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, King Lear, and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Shakespeare's Fugitive Politics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Julius Caesar ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Political Events

Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare’s plays reveal there is always something more terrifying to the king than rebellion. The book seeks to move beyond the presumption that political evolution leads ineluctably away from autocracy and aristocracy toward republicanism and popular sovereignty. Instead, it argues for affirmative politics in Shakespeare—the process of transforming scenes of negative affect into political resistance. Shakespeare’s Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeare’s affirmative politics appears not in his dialectical opposition to sovereignty, absolutism, or tyranny; nor is his affirmative politics an inchoate form of republicanism on its way to becoming politically viable. Instead, this study claims that it is in the place of dissensus that the expression of the eventful condition of affirmative politics takes place – a fugitive expression that the sovereign order always wishes to shut down. Exploring a concept of fugitive politics in Coriolanus, King John, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, The Winter’s Tale and Julius Caesar, the study contends that this investment in political theory during a time of crisis helps to explain Shakespeare’s enduring relevance to theo-political events beyond the early modern stage.

Spectres of Female Sovereignty in Shakespeare’s Plays

2016 ◽  
pp. 111-130
Author(s):  
Susan Frye
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Henry V ◽  
Winter's Tale

Spectres of historical queens in several of Shakespeare’s plays recall the political importance not only of queens themselves, but of the vexed issue of sovereignty as it was gendered in early modern political thought. Representations of and allusions to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots in Henry V, Henry VIII, and The Winter’s Tale expose the strategies through which actual queens as well as their supporters authorized and defended early modern female sovereignty. At the same time, because female sovereignty rests on the connection between the female body and the political body, definitions of female sovereignty remain unstable, capable of both reinforcing and disrupting the connection. When Shakespeare creates his historical and fictional queens, he raises their spectres as untimely versions of female sovereignty as well as the uncanny role of the female body in representing time itself.

‘Remedies for Life’: Curing Hysterica Passio in Shakespeare’s Othello, Macbeth and The Winter’s Tale

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sélima Lejri
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Female Body ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Scientific Theories ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Rational Alternative

Sélima Lejri is similarly interested in the coexistence of long-established folklore beliefs in demonism and witchcraft and the emerging scientific etiologies propounded by the physicians of the time. Lejri shows that it is thanks to Edward Jorden’s A Briefe Discourse of A Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603) that the interpretations of demonic vexation started to give way to the rational alternative of hysteria. It was then that Shakespeare’s interest in the medical theories of physiology, mainly humorism, became palpable. This testifies to the considerable influence of Timothy Bright’s or Edward Jorden’s ideas. Within this context of early modern scientific ‘revolution’ that ushered in the end of witch-hunting and gave large credit to reason over superstition, Shakespeare’s representation of the female body in his Jacobean plays bears the contemporary stamp of his new sources of information. It is Shakespeare’s response to such contemporary scientific theories that Lejri’s chapter aims at tackling through the particular example of Hysterica Passio, a feminine disease much discussed at the time and explicitly referenced in King Lear.

Chaste Treasure and National Identity in the Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline

Chaste Value ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Gillen
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Central Place ◽  
The State ◽  
National Imaginary ◽  
Rape Of Lucrece

This chapter addresses chastity’s role in English (and British) national identity, arguing that Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline question the Roman myth’s application in early capitalist England. In particular, both works employ chastity-as-treasure tropes tointerrogate the ways in which commercial models disrupt national ideologies that align Elizabeth I’s virgin body with the integrity of the state. The Rape of Lucrece exposes the ways in which mercantile treasure discourse invites sexual violence, compromising a woman who metonymically symbolises the state. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare reconfigures the Lucretia myth so as to articulate a revised mode of chaste national thinking suited to a nation headed by a male monarch and aspiring to become an imperial mercantile power. By transforming Innogen’s jewellery into currency that circulates in her name, Shakespeare infuses Britain’s expanding mercantile sphere—and its imperial projects—with chaste, white legitimacy while removing the physical female body from its once central place in the national imaginary.

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