Who’s It? Acting the Actress in Shakespearean Comedy

Comedy was the mainstay of the Shakespearean stage, which constantly adapted roles, methods, and plot elements from the Italians, who performed and disseminated both scripted and improvised plays. Using Italian sources about the playing and materials of star actresses, this chapter tracks their imprint in the roles of Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, Viola in Twelfth Night, and Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well. Each bears a distinctive comic profile with un-English female traits—such as improvisatory wit, Latin learning, violent passions, delight in acting, and showy poeticism—in ways that stress alien theatricality, agency, and glamour. Some aspects satirize racialized traits, for example Catholic deviousness, Sicilian violence, and Italianate “sexual strangeness.”

“Were not that a botchy core?”: the Function of Disease in 2 Henry IV, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, and Twelfth Night

<p>The social currency of disease has developed and changed dramatically over the centuries, and this thesis focuses on how Shakespeare used the currency of early modern disease in his plays. Shakespeare’s use of disease and disease metaphors is discussed within the context of four plays: Henry IV Part Two, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida. The first chapter (of three) finds that the purpose of disease within the body politic metaphors is, inevitably, complication. In order to counter and resolve the disease of the state, advisors become physicians, extending the potential of the analogy further until it permeates the social structure of the plays and our perception of the characters. Disease is employed to imply division, instability, and disorder within the imagined body of the state. The second chapter shows how the idea of infection is used to highlight interpersonal concerns within the plays. The chapter uses references to early modern sources and beliefs about the four humours to illustrate how Shakespeare connects social disorder, disease, morality, and status. The discussion focuses on Galen’s “nonnaturals” which were believed to affect humoral balance, highlighting the significance of early modern conceptions of diet, exercise, miasma, sleep, and stress which serve to create a pervading sense of disease in the social worlds of the plays. The personal and often horrifying experiences of mental disease we are presented with in King Lear and Twelfth Night are the focus of the third and final chapter. The display of suffering is found to primarily serve to emphasise the commonality of man. In both plays (though at different levels of seriousness) insanity causes a loss of social status for the sufferer and, through this loss of status, their humanity is stressed. The dramatic potential of madness allows the theatre of the courtroom to be parodied to draw questions about injustice into the plays, though without offering any definitive conclusions to them. The literary nature of madness within these plays, furthermore, allows for the clear presentation of issues of class and justice. Generally Shakespeare abandons absolute realism in favour of using disease and disease metaphors as a disrupting influence on social and political order so as to emphasise a wide range of themes and ideas.</p>

“Were not that a botchy core?”: the Function of Disease in 2 Henry IV, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, and Twelfth Night

<p>The social currency of disease has developed and changed dramatically over the centuries, and this thesis focuses on how Shakespeare used the currency of early modern disease in his plays. Shakespeare’s use of disease and disease metaphors is discussed within the context of four plays: Henry IV Part Two, Twelfth Night, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida. The first chapter (of three) finds that the purpose of disease within the body politic metaphors is, inevitably, complication. In order to counter and resolve the disease of the state, advisors become physicians, extending the potential of the analogy further until it permeates the social structure of the plays and our perception of the characters. Disease is employed to imply division, instability, and disorder within the imagined body of the state. The second chapter shows how the idea of infection is used to highlight interpersonal concerns within the plays. The chapter uses references to early modern sources and beliefs about the four humours to illustrate how Shakespeare connects social disorder, disease, morality, and status. The discussion focuses on Galen’s “nonnaturals” which were believed to affect humoral balance, highlighting the significance of early modern conceptions of diet, exercise, miasma, sleep, and stress which serve to create a pervading sense of disease in the social worlds of the plays. The personal and often horrifying experiences of mental disease we are presented with in King Lear and Twelfth Night are the focus of the third and final chapter. The display of suffering is found to primarily serve to emphasise the commonality of man. In both plays (though at different levels of seriousness) insanity causes a loss of social status for the sufferer and, through this loss of status, their humanity is stressed. The dramatic potential of madness allows the theatre of the courtroom to be parodied to draw questions about injustice into the plays, though without offering any definitive conclusions to them. The literary nature of madness within these plays, furthermore, allows for the clear presentation of issues of class and justice. Generally Shakespeare abandons absolute realism in favour of using disease and disease metaphors as a disrupting influence on social and political order so as to emphasise a wide range of themes and ideas.</p>

Structural Doubleness and Repetition

Chapter 2, treating comic doubleness as a structural matter, explores the way scenes, actions, and plot lines reflect each other, as if to create an uncanny closed circuit or dream-world. Those reflections call up a long-standing critical recognition of ‘magical parallelisms,’ such as between the story lines of Viola and Sebastian, that express the Renaissance fascination with analogy and with occult theories of sympathetic influence. Within the play, structural doublings create affects ranging from enervation and frustrated desires, to a premonition of fatedness and converging destinies, to the agitation of manically accelerated action, to the liberating recognition of differences with in repetitions. Focusing on Twelfth Night, this chapter considers how the play creates the sense of a numinous but opaque providentialism, features that it also finds in other Shakespearean, Italian, and Tudor plays, including those of John Lyly.

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.

Clowns, Fools, and Folly

Chapter 1, on clowns, fools, and folly analyzes the clown-figure in terms of his magical ontology and explores moments of folly that intervene—transformatively, enchantingly—in a comic narrative. In doing so, it argues against the prevailing view that fool- and clown-figures are fundamentally marginal and peripheral to a play’s action, at least in the case of the comedies. The chapter demonstrates how these magical clowns can influence other characters, affecting their perceptions and choices, illustrated especially in Feste’s fantastical chop-logical interview with the lachrymose Olivia in Twelfth Night, which makes possible her subsequent infatuation with Viola. It also shows how clowns can intervene in and alter the action, with Dogberry, a hybrid of Providence and everyman, emerging as a paradigmatic example. The chapter closes with a discussion of the theater-happy Bottom as the mystical moral center of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A Pragma-Stylistic Study of Implicature in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Twelfth Night

Implicature is commonly defined as the dissimilarity between what is said and what is meant. The variance lies between the conspicuous meaning of written and spoken words and the meaning that lies beneath what is said. This study aims at analyzing and discussing Shakespeare's Hamlet and Twelfth Night in terms of generalized and particularized conversational and conventional implicature. The model used in the analysis is coined from a variety of pragmatic theories, implicature, Grice's maxims, irony, indirect speech acts, context, and hedges. It is hypothesized that the number of implicature cases in Twelfth Night is bigger than that in Hamlet, generation of implicatures by the characters in the two plays is highly determined by social factors, Hamlet and Cesario use implicature more than other characters, the most used implicature is the particularized one, the purpose of using implicatures differs in the plays, implicature is generated from flouting Grice's maxims and most implicatures are made by violating the relation maxim. The study concludes that the implications in Hamlet are more than those in Twelfth Night, that Shakespeare uses two implicatures generalized and particularized, and that Implicature in Hamlet and Twelfth Night is generated mostly by violating the maxims of quality. As for the least flouted maxim in the two plays is the maxim of quantity.

_UMA ANÁLISE ECOFEMINISTA DE TWELFTH NIGHT

Nos últimos quarenta anos, a crítica literária feminista apontou o fato de que Shakespeare questionou papeis de gênero e defendeu as mulheres em suas peças num contexto de misoginia e exclusão das mulheres. Mais recentemente, teóricas do ecofeminismo, como Rebecca Laroche e Jennifer Munroe, argumentaram que as peças de Shakespeare também desestabilizam as fronteiras entre humanos e não humanos, elemento essencial para se desconstruir complexas questões de gênero. Adotando uma perspectiva ecofeminista, este ensaio propõe uma analise de Viola, a protagonista de Twelfth Night de Shakespeare, buscando demonstrar de que modo a relação desta personagem com o mundo marinho expande a interpretação do cross-dressing. Primeiramente, o ensaio introduzirá a teoria ecofeminista desconstrucionista de Val Plumwood e discutirá de que modo a visão da Idade Moderna sobre o mundo natural é pertinente para uma análise ecofeminista. Em seguida, fundamentado pela obra Shakespeare’s Ocean de Dan Brayon, examinará como a relação de Viola com o mundo marinho mina os papeis de gênero e desconstrói o próprio conceito de “humanidade”. Palavras-chave: Shakespeare. Ecofeminismo. Ecocrítica.

Twelfth Night and Epiphany

This chapter explores William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Twelfth Night is pervasively an Epiphany play; it calls for a set positively festooned with holly. Twelfth Night marks the end of a festive season in which there were other occasions alluded to by Shakespeare rather than Twelfth Night. But the correlations with Twelfth Night itself are salient: its customary activities provide plot material, and its emotional tone, as the last of festivity, can be sensed in the melancholy atmosphere of transience. Viewed as a seasonal mélange, the themes of Twelfth Night fall into place and gain coherence. The chapter then looks at the Platonic and Pythagorean content of Twelfth Night. Meanwhile, in Shakespeare’s unfolding of true love, narrative motifs are not the only resource; others range from implicit emblem to rhetorical explication. If Twelfth Night presents a philosophy of love, and traces the moderating of various erotic passions, there is nevertheless a focus on one excess in particular: love melancholy.