Scene

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce R. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Robert Greene ◽  
Important Relationship ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Dramatic Action

This chapter examines the scene as a segment of dramatic action marked at the beginning and end by an empty stage, scene as big effect, and scene as fictional setting. It begins with a discussion of the scene to which Robert Greene alludes inGreenes, groats-vvorth of witte(1592). It then considers the folio text ofHenry VI, Part Threeto show how acts and scenes were marked in plays printed between 1590 and 1630. It also discusses two ways that scenes can be registered verbally in scripts: marking and remarking. Finally, it explores the connection between physical means and theatrical ends in early modern usage in the context of scene, along with senses of ‘scene’ that may be increasingly remote from theatres as physical structures but that nonetheless maintain an important relationship with theatrical performance as a way of framing and understanding human experience.

‘Think me cold, frozen, and impotent, and so report me?’: Volpone and His ‘Castrone’ Complex

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Hui
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
The Subject

Reading Jonson with the Fabliau, Boccaccio and Chaucer, this chapter, with the help of Lacan’s theory, rereads Volpone Act 3 scene 7, explaining why Volpone ‘delays’ his ‘rape’ of Celia. While Volpone is commonly known for his love of theatrical performance and transformation, the chapter suggests that this cannot be thought without the concept of his being ‘castrated’. Although ‘castration’ is usually regarded as a censoring force, Volpone is empowered and thrives on it. Moreover, this chapter compares the scene in Volpone with another similar one in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado, discussing how the subject of castration is used in early modern comedy and tragicomedy.

“Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments”: Embodied Perception in The Changeling

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-87
Author(s):  
M. Burdick Smith
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Thomas Middleton ◽  
Sense Perception ◽  
Embodied Perception ◽  
Perceptual Theory ◽  
Dramatic Action

This essay argues that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) draws on debates about sense perception in the period to interrogate the effects of dramatic representation. After a brief overview of early modern perceptual theory, this essay demonstrates that the play's villain, De Flores, manipulates other characters’ perception through language. In fact, De Flores uses theatrical language to manipulate how other characters perceive their environment, indicating the theater's ability to manipulate audiences. By affecting how characters perceive, De Flores affects other characters’ ability to process and react to their environment, which impedes their judgment. The essay argues that much of The Changeling's dramatic action unfolds through a conflict between two models of perception—presentational and representational—that undergird much of the play's dramatic conflict. In the play, pervasive anxiety about judgment, particularly how perception affects judgment, is structured around the distinction between these two models of perception. Considering the play alongside representational and presentational models indicates how early modern dramatists engage with intellectual theories to consider how representation works and how spaces are experienced. In this way, the theater refracts and dramatizes theories about perception.

The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Gilbert-Santamaria
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Spanish Literature ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Alternative Modality ◽  
Sancho Panza

This book posits the Aristotelian-Ciceronian notion of perfect male friendship as an independent poetic force within the development of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through a re-examination of Spanish critic Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s notion of the “tale of two friends” tradition, the book shows how the poetics of friendship evolves in relation to other key concepts from the period—most notably exemplarity and imitatio—in a series of carefully selected examples from several important genres including the pastoral novel, the picaresque, and the Spanish comedia. Particular attention is given to the trajectory whereby the highly formalized narrativization of the traditional Aristotelian paradigm for friendship gives way to representations of personal intimacy grounded in a recognition of the idiosyncratic particularity of human experience in the world beyond the text. This alternative modality for representing friendship, which encompasses a variety of relationships beyond the Aristotelian paradigm—between women, erstwhile lovers, and pícaros, to take just three examples—reaches its fullest expression in the depiction of the evolving intimacy that grows up between the two unlikely companions, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose shared experiences provide the main focus for Cervantes’s most important work.

Intertheatricality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
William N. West
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Dense Point ◽  
Present Mode

This chapter examines intertheatricality in early modern drama and particularly the ways that intertheatrical moments reveal how a present mode of playing distinguishes itself from modes that precede it, but which it also preserves as a resource. Playgoing, it argues, implied the ability to pick out many different types of theatrical elements, at many different scales; what appears to us as a textual crux or lacuna may signify an especially dense point on a system of intertheatrical references that has been lost. Through an analysis of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays such as Thomas Kyd’sThe Spanish Tragedy, the chapter considers a shift from a notion of allusion—which produces complexity of meaning by juxtaposing two or more texts—to a notion of the analogue as a resource of theatrical possibility, familiarity, and difference. It shows that the formal elements in circulation discerned by intertheatricality appear not only as forms, but also as themes of theatrical performance.

Fantasizing about Revenge

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-108
Author(s):  
Emily L. King
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Poor Treatment ◽  
English Identity

Chapter three examines the relation between fantasy and civil vengeance through the figure of the vagrant. Insofar as vagrants are presumed responsible for major social problems, civil society justifies its poor treatment as retribution. Reading Jack Cade’s rebellion in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI, the chapter proposes that normative society’s fantasy of its own victimhood produces vagrant bodies that are constructed to withstand extreme forms of labor and punishment, and the resulting bodies then sustain an expanding nation-state. Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton reveals the dynamic at work on the international stage in its attempts to define early modern Englishness against not only the Continent but also cosmopolitanism. While the impoverished vagrant offers social cohesion to normative subjects within the domestic project of nationalism, the affluent cosmopolitan vagrant and his eventual recoil from other cultures offers the fiction of a secure English identity.

Baroque and Neobaroque: Making Thistory

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Greene
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
The Face

Among the most historically fixed of art historical and literary concepts, the Baroque arises at the intersection of early modern classicism, imperialism, and science—that is, out of the high Renaissance—to become a kind of antiprogram of resistances: to the absolutist state, the rise of empirical science, the pressures of empire, and other sixteenth-century signs of the gathering regimentation of knowledge. With a flourish of forms and a play of perspectives, the baroque embodies the recoil from such regimentation and the gathering sense that all these systems for organizing human experience fall short in the face of disorder, contingency, and death. Seen from certain vantages, the specimens of the baroque often seem complicit with the projects of absolutism, empire, and late humanism; but regarded in all their dimensions, such works are often complex reactions, critical and compromised, to those projects.

Conversional Thinking and the London Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 87-109
Author(s):  
Stephen Wittek
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Theatrical Culture ◽  
London Stage

This chapter begins to build a framework for understanding the relation between conversion and a key structure of early modern thought: theatrical performance. Taking early modern London as a specific focus, the analysis considers the embeddedness of conversional thinking within the city’s concentration of media resources, placing particular emphasis on the ability of theatrical affordances to facilitate creative experimentation and critical examination around received categories of identity. The central text under consideration is Dekker and Middleton’s The Honest Whore, but the analysis is also generally applicable to the theatrical culture and broader media environment of early modern London.

Base Slavery and Roman Yoke

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Nyquist
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal Form ◽  
Dramatic Works ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Dramatic Action

Unlike ‘race’, with which ‘slavery’ is often associated in today’s society, early modern language relating to servitude is under-investigated. Using Shakespeare’s dramatic works as its primary archive, this chapter explores two forms of extra-legal slavery which, it is argued, facilitate discursive exchange between intra-European or intra-British modes of degradation and those employed in Anglo-colonialism. It begins with a study of ‘slave’ as a status-based pejorative that can be differentiated from ‘villain’ and ‘peasant’, and understood in connection with the Vagrancy Act of 1547, which introduced a form of penal ‘slavery’. The second extra-legal form of slavery, war slavery, is explored as part of the dramatic action of Titus Andronicus and Cymbeline, and with reference to debates on Anglo-colonialism.

‘She’s Turned Fury’: Women Transmogrified in Revenge Plays

2018 ◽  
pp. 220-236
Author(s):  
Janet Clare
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Revenge Tragedy ◽  
Henry Vi ◽  
Revenge Plays

This chapter explores early modern responses to Hecuba, arguing that whereas Euripides’ Hecuba is a sympathetic tragic heroine and successful avenger, this model was not replicated in early modern plays. Instead the two aspects of Hecuba’s role, that of lamenting mother and ruthless avenger, bifurcate in English revenge tragedy. Pitiful, mourning mothers such as Isabella from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy are unsuccessful, while savage ones, such as Tamora from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, are abhorrent and aberrant, inflicting violence from a position of power. In contrast to Germany and France – where artistic treatments of the Biblical Judith decapitating General Holofernes offer a heroic, political image of female vengeance – the chapter argues that in early modern England revenge was definitively not a woman’s business.

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