Book Reviews: The Most Pleasant History of Ornatus and Artesia, Gwydonius, or the Card of Taney, “Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit” and “Euphues and His England”: An Annotated, Modern-Spelling Edition, Moderatus, Banquets Set Forth. Banqueting in English Renaissance Drama, Beggary and Theatre in Early Modern England, Le Vagabond dans l'Angleterre de Shakespeare, ou l'art de contrefaire à la ville et à la scène, the Anatomie of Abuses, John Knox: Reformation Rhetoric and the Traditions of Scots Prose (1490–1570), Secret Shakespeare, Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance, Shakespeare's Religious Allusiveness: Its Play and Tolerance, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan

2004 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
Charles Whitworth ◽  
Guillaume Winter ◽  
Sophie Chiari-Lasserre ◽  
Guillaume Winter ◽  
Pierre Janton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
History Of

Nobody, Somebody, and King Lear

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Womack
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Positive Events ◽  
East Anglia ◽  
English Renaissance Drama ◽  
The University

The approximately contemporary Jacobean plays, King Lear and Nobody and Somebody, share an ancient British setting, a preoccupation with instability in the state, and an unsettling interest in negation. Peter Womack here suggests that by reading them together we can retrieve some of the theatrical strangeness which the more famous of the two has lost through familiarity and naturalization. The dramatic mode of existence of the character called ‘Nobody’ is paradoxical, denaturing – an early modern visual and verbal Verfremdungseffekt, at once philosophical and clownish. His negativity, which is articulated in dialogue with the companion figure of ‘Somebody’, is matched in King Lear, above all in the role of Edgar, but also by a more diffused state of being (withdrawal, effacement, folly) which the play generates in reaction to its positive events. Ultimately the negation in both plays is social in character: ‘Nobody’ is the dramatic face of the poor and oppressed. Peter Womack teaches literature at the University of East Anglia. His most recent book is English Renaissance Drama (2006), in the Blackwell Guides to Literature series.

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