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.

“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.

scholarly journals Word-entries and Big Data in Lexicons of Early Modern English

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-234
Author(s):  
Ian Lancashire
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Online Database ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
History Of ◽  
Survival And Growth ◽  
The University

This brief thirty-year history of Lexicons of Early Modern English, an online database of glossaries and dictionaries of the period, begins in a fourteenth-floor Robarts Library lab of the Centre for Computing and the Humanities at the University of Toronto in 1986. It was first published freely online in 1996 as the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database. Ten years later, in a seventh-floor lab also in the Robarts Library, it came out as LEME, thanks to support from TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) and the University of Toronto Press and Library. No other modern language has such a resource. The most important reason for the emergence, survival, and growth of LEME is that its contemporary lexicographers understood their language differently from how we, our many advantages notwithstanding, have conceived it over the past two centuries. Cette brève histoire des trente ans du Lexicons of Early Modern English, une base de données en ligne de glossaires et de dictionnaires de l’époque, commence en 1986 dans le laboratoire du Centre for Computing and the Humanities, au quatorzième étage de la bibliothèque Robarts de l’Université de Toronto. Cette base de données a été publiée gratuitement en ligne premièrement en 1996, sous le titre Early Modern English Dictionnaires Database. Dix ans plus tard, elle était publiée sous le sigle LEME, à partir du septième étage de la même bibliothèque Robarts, grâce au soutien du TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research), de la bibliothèque et des presses de l’Université de Toronto. Aucune autre langue vivante ne dispose d’une telle ressource. La principale raison expliquant l’émergence, la survie et la croissance du LEME est que les lexicographes qui font l’objet du LEME comprenaient leur langue très différemment que nous la concevons depuis deux siècles, et ce nonobstant plusieurs de nos avantages.

Civil rites

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Bax ◽  
Nanne Streekstra
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Multiple Meaning ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
Ritual Language ◽  
The One ◽  
Special Category

We shall be concerned with a mode of epistolary politeness that marks a special category of ritual language use. Taking examples from the correspondence between Hooft and Huygens, two notable representatives of the Dutch Republic’s cultural elite, we will establish, first, that the notions and methods of the modern language-and-politeness paradigm are well-suited tools for exploring politeness phenomena occurring in seventeenth-century Dutch. Next we will argue that, in cases like the one under study, negatively polite ostentation is by and large a ritual affair, particularly since the use of subservient phrases and other expressions according to the humiliative mode is generally a game, rather than earnestly paying deference. As regards the issue of playful make-believe politeness, it will be contended that early modern society was quite preoccupied with various genres of “deceit”, artistic and otherwise, and took much pleasure in the witty exploitation of multiple meaning design, also when it concerned doing the civil thing.

Women Writing in English

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty Travitsky
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
Low Literacy ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
British America ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Early Modern Women ◽  
Interdisciplinary Journal

However much of a Renaissance early modern Englishwomen writers may, or may not, have experienced—a question raised in 1977 by Joan Kelly (“Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977], 137–164) and revisited in 2013 in a forum in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (8); see Trends in Modern Interpretation—their writing practices seem not to have been immediately affected by the coming of the book. Of over thirty-three thousand entries in A Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991), eighty-five have been assigned to women authors, or approximately 0.5 percent, and these titles appeared predominantly between 1545 and 1640. The dramatic increase in printed writings by women from 1641 to 1700 constitutes approximately 1.2 percent of the titles in print from a period in which fewer than seven hundred titles have been assigned to women of the over 120,000 recorded titles in Donald Goddard Wing’s Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1972–1988). These small numbers of works can be explained, in part, by relatively low literacy rates among women compared to men and by the disapproval of women’s expressing their thoughts in public(ation). With the fairly recent growth of research into manuscript writings by women, it seems indisputable that most early modern Englishwomen writers raised their voices in manuscript rather than in print and in what we now term private, noncanonical forms like letters and diaries. It also seems that most of those women who wrote poems or dramas or prose of traditional types circulated their writings in familial and social manuscript networks (a proportion suggested by recovered materials); scholars are turning increased attention to these manuscript writers and writings.

scholarly journals Black skin matters : the significance of color in early modern England

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Timothy Love
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Black People ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Black Skin ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
The Impact

This book explores the impact of stereotypical concepts associated with black skin color in representations of black people during the English Renaissance, namely Shakespeare's Othello (Othello), Aaron (Titus Andronicus), Caliban (The Tempest), Rosaline (Love's Labour's Lost), and the "dark lady" (Sonnets). Ultimately, this book demonstrates how Shakespeare, and texts of select English Renaissance authors, retaliate against traditional stereotypical, mythical, or colonial representations of black people -- representations stemming from distinct resentments for black skin color, hegemonic notions of black inferiority, and opportunistic ambitions deriving from collective concepts of white superiority. These very early postcolonial-minded authors foreshadow modern postcolonial philosophers as they factually assess psychological patterns associated with early modern black people who endure racial discrimination, subjugation, and assimilation. Their literature contrasts previous and contemporary colonial works which fail to reference or utilize fact over racial myth when creating representations of black individuals.

scholarly journals Rich Ornaments and Delightful Engines: The Poetics of Failed Festivity and Figural Automation in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Żukowska
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Principal Element ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Human Flesh ◽  
The City

The present study focuses on the poetics of failed festivity in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, tracing analogies between early modern festival culture, in particular the Joyous Entry of the Renaissance prince into the city, and the machinery of the play, which is set in motion by Titus. The principal element of this machinery is the figure of Lavinia, who can be seen as the inverted version of such wonders of occa- sional architecture and civic pageantry as the automaton, the breathing sculpture and the automatic waterwork. One of the major problems explored is the confrontation of reality and fiction, or human flesh and art, in the manifestly echoic universe of the play, where the objectified automaton-like figure responds to the actions of its animators with its own stirring.

The End of the Beginning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Scott
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Young Subject ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
The Status

Developing Chapter 2’s interest in forms of obligation and authority, Chapter 3 extends its focus to the tragedies and the spaces that children occupy in relation to their parents. Providing new readings of Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and King Lear, Chapter 3 explores the status of the child, not as a necessarily young subject, although many of Shakespeare’s children are, but in relation to early modern forms of obligation. Looking at contemporary parenting manuals, pedagogic texts, and household manuals, this chapter puts some of Shakespeare’s tragic children within the contexts of authority and supplication. Understanding the term ‘child’ as descriptive of the human’s relation to God, Chapter 3 explores the different forms that subjection takes in the tragic imagination. Attending to free will in Romeo and Juliet, infantilism in Titus, and supplication in Lear, this chapter shows the significance of the ties that bind one human to another.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document