Hedeggerian Thinking and The Role of Memory in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Heidegger’s existentialism goes beyond the limits of the human brain’s functioning where thinking is more than what rationality may generate. In his essay “What is called Thinking?” Heidegger mentions that thinking and thanking are related. This relationship is clarified in Margaret Visser’s The Gift of Thanks, where she describes gratitude emphasizing the role of memory in expressing it. On this basis, one explores how thanking is performed in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale examining both memory and thinking interferences in the course of the characters’ thanking. Leontes sudden jealousy makes him loose all positive thoughts imprisoning Hermione, who expects reward having but obeyed his wishes to convince his friend to stay. After the trial scene, Paulina brings Leontes' recollections into life; by enumerating his wife's amiable personality. In act five, the remorseful king blames himself for his ingratitude. One considers this as the recovery of his memory since “both memory and thanks move their being in the thanc” as Heidegger asserts it. The final scene proves one’s assumption, that to thank is to think where Leontes thanks Paulina graciously by marrying her to his most honest servant Camillo. In short, to utter “thankfulessness would be thoughtlessness”

The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

<p>The Renaissance is often touted as the age of melancholy. For fictional personages like Hamlet as well as for writers like Robert Burton, melancholy served both as a burden and a blessing, facilitating intellectual activity at the expense of psychological and bodily comfort. Precisely because of its Aristotelean associations with brilliance, melancholy was off-limits to early modern women, who were afforded a pathology different not merely in degree but in kind to that of the male melancholic. Female melancholy was understood as an entirely corporeal illness, lacking any semblance of the creative or intellectual fecundity which its male sufferers enjoyed. Literary critics and cultural historians have long taken the authors of early modern medical treatises at their word, and because of this, the extant scholarship on melancholy projects an overwhelmingly masculinist history of the emotion. Those scholars who have addressed the subterraneous literature of women’s emotion in the Renaissance, moreover, have commonly understood female-voiced articulations of negative affect through the lens of “grief” or “sorrow”. A poetics of female melancholy in the English Renaissance is thus still awaiting formulation, and it is this critical absence that I move to redress. Putting male-authored, canonical works of literature in dialogue with the poetry of three seventeenth-century women writers, this thesis pursues the topic of a literary melancholy that is specifically female, or female-voiced. Chapter One explores the shape of female melancholic discourse in two Shakespearean texts – Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and in the poetry of devotional poet An Collins. Chapter Two considers the telos of self-marmorisation (the female melancholic’s turn to stone) first in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Comus, and then in the verse of Hester Pulter. Finally, Chapter Three discusses the presence of postlapsarian melancholy in the elegies of Lucy Hutchinson. All three chapters argue for the significance, the matter, of artistic representations of women’s affect in a period which has traditionally seen male expressions of melancholy raised above female expressions of the same.</p>

The Matter of Early Modern Female Melancholy

<p>The Renaissance is often touted as the age of melancholy. For fictional personages like Hamlet as well as for writers like Robert Burton, melancholy served both as a burden and a blessing, facilitating intellectual activity at the expense of psychological and bodily comfort. Precisely because of its Aristotelean associations with brilliance, melancholy was off-limits to early modern women, who were afforded a pathology different not merely in degree but in kind to that of the male melancholic. Female melancholy was understood as an entirely corporeal illness, lacking any semblance of the creative or intellectual fecundity which its male sufferers enjoyed. Literary critics and cultural historians have long taken the authors of early modern medical treatises at their word, and because of this, the extant scholarship on melancholy projects an overwhelmingly masculinist history of the emotion. Those scholars who have addressed the subterraneous literature of women’s emotion in the Renaissance, moreover, have commonly understood female-voiced articulations of negative affect through the lens of “grief” or “sorrow”. A poetics of female melancholy in the English Renaissance is thus still awaiting formulation, and it is this critical absence that I move to redress. Putting male-authored, canonical works of literature in dialogue with the poetry of three seventeenth-century women writers, this thesis pursues the topic of a literary melancholy that is specifically female, or female-voiced. Chapter One explores the shape of female melancholic discourse in two Shakespearean texts – Hamlet and The Two Noble Kinsmen – and in the poetry of devotional poet An Collins. Chapter Two considers the telos of self-marmorisation (the female melancholic’s turn to stone) first in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Milton’s Comus, and then in the verse of Hester Pulter. Finally, Chapter Three discusses the presence of postlapsarian melancholy in the elegies of Lucy Hutchinson. All three chapters argue for the significance, the matter, of artistic representations of women’s affect in a period which has traditionally seen male expressions of melancholy raised above female expressions of the same.</p>

Griselda’s Afterlife, or the Relationship between Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale and the Tale of Magic

Some influence of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, also known as the story of the patient Griselda, on Shakespeare, and particularly on The Winter’s Tale, has long been recognized. It seems, however, that the matter deserves further attention because the echoes of The Clerk’s Tale seem scattered among a number of Shakespeare’s plays, especially the later ones. The experimental nature of this phenomenon consists in the fact that Griselda-like characters do not strike the reader, especially perhaps the Renaissance reader, as good protagonists of a tragedy, or even a problem comedy. The Aristotelian conception of the tragic hero does not seem to fit Griselda because there is no “tragic fault” in her: she is completely innocent. It was thus a bold decision on the part of Shakespeare to use this archetype as a corner stone of at least some of his plays.

The Dramaturgy of Female Gender in Early Modern English Theatre: An Investigation of the Theatrical Expression of Gender in Selected Jacobean Plays, Their Restoration/Early Eighteenth-Century Adaptations, and Their Original and Contemporary Staging

<p>The adaptations of Shakespeare‘s plays that were written and staged during the English Restoration and eighteenth century form an important part of the performance history of Shakespeare; yet they have never been employed in research on the female characters in the original plays. This thesis analyzes four late Shakespeare plays and their adaptations: The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher) and Davenant's The Rivals; The Tempest and Davenant and Dryden's The Enchanted Island; The Winter's Tale and Garrick's Florizel and Perdita; and the lost Cardenio (also with Fletcher) and Theobald's Double Falsehood. Investigating the dramaturgy of the female characters from a theatrical point-of-view that includes both a close-reading and imagining of the text with a "directorial eye" and practical staging work, this study examines not only language but the construction and representation of character through emotional and physical states of being, gestures and movement, sound (music and the sound of speech), props, costumes, spectacle, stage directions, use of space and architecture, and the audience. The adaptations have been used as a lens to encounter afresh the female characters in the original plays. Through this approach, I have discovered evidence to challenge some traditional interpretations of Shakespeare's female characters and have also offered new readings of the characters. In addition, I have demonstrated the danger of accepting the widely held critical view that the introduction of actresses on the Restoration stage prompted adaptors to sexualize the female roles in a demeaning, trivial, and meretricious manner. In fact, female roles in the Restoration had some power to subvert gender boundaries just as they did in the Renaissance when played by boy actors. This work explores the treatment of themes and motifs that recur around the staging of women in the early modern period such as madness, cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting, rape and sexual violence, and the use of silence by female characters. Each chapter draws individual conclusions about the female characters in the plays, often drawing parallels between two central women in particular play. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of the ways the women in Shakespeare's plays express their agency and desire.</p>

The Dramaturgy of Female Gender in Early Modern English Theatre: An Investigation of the Theatrical Expression of Gender in Selected Jacobean Plays, Their Restoration/Early Eighteenth-Century Adaptations, and Their Original and Contemporary Staging

<p>The adaptations of Shakespeare‘s plays that were written and staged during the English Restoration and eighteenth century form an important part of the performance history of Shakespeare; yet they have never been employed in research on the female characters in the original plays. This thesis analyzes four late Shakespeare plays and their adaptations: The Two Noble Kinsmen (with Fletcher) and Davenant's The Rivals; The Tempest and Davenant and Dryden's The Enchanted Island; The Winter's Tale and Garrick's Florizel and Perdita; and the lost Cardenio (also with Fletcher) and Theobald's Double Falsehood. Investigating the dramaturgy of the female characters from a theatrical point-of-view that includes both a close-reading and imagining of the text with a "directorial eye" and practical staging work, this study examines not only language but the construction and representation of character through emotional and physical states of being, gestures and movement, sound (music and the sound of speech), props, costumes, spectacle, stage directions, use of space and architecture, and the audience. The adaptations have been used as a lens to encounter afresh the female characters in the original plays. Through this approach, I have discovered evidence to challenge some traditional interpretations of Shakespeare's female characters and have also offered new readings of the characters. In addition, I have demonstrated the danger of accepting the widely held critical view that the introduction of actresses on the Restoration stage prompted adaptors to sexualize the female roles in a demeaning, trivial, and meretricious manner. In fact, female roles in the Restoration had some power to subvert gender boundaries just as they did in the Renaissance when played by boy actors. This work explores the treatment of themes and motifs that recur around the staging of women in the early modern period such as madness, cross-gender disguise and cross-gender casting, rape and sexual violence, and the use of silence by female characters. Each chapter draws individual conclusions about the female characters in the plays, often drawing parallels between two central women in particular play. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the complexity and multiplicity of the ways the women in Shakespeare's plays express their agency and desire.</p>

The Return from 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.

Women as Heroes in Shakespearean Drama

Shakespeare studies Nature in the context of human behaviour. His drama deals with transformations and he displays these changes on both social and personal levels through alternating the graphic images from characters to situation. In an authoritarian society where lives of women were governed by a belief system which resulted out of Nature’s disposition of preordained roles in society, the portrayal of dominating female voices would have bothered many. Shakespearean drama is a protest against the society which is always dominated by the destructive forces of male paranoia, egocentrism, patriarchal instinct of exploitation of the weak, male sexual anxiety and corrupt abuse of rules of justice by the powerful. A study of the female mind presented in Shakespearean drama is seen at its best in The Winter’s Tale. The following article is an attempt to explore some of the aspects of Womanhood in Shakespearean art.