Becoming Caliban

Caliban’s semantic slipperiness derives from page descriptions and stage performances that excessively mark Caliban’s bodies with vilifying language, while at the same time destabilizing the referential value of that language through their very excessiveness. ‘Fish’, ‘beast’, and ‘Hag-seed’ spawn the incoherent stage signs of fins, fur, scales, and skin disease. Following monstrous vectors of contagion along rhizomatic lines, my readings will concern themselves with the de- and re-territorializations of Caliban’s bodies on page and stage: first by focusing on the tracings of language that inscribe Caliban’s identity, and second by mapping the movements of ‘becoming-animal’ and ‘becoming-imperceptible’ that signal his lines of flight. I ultimately argue for the usefulness of Caliban’s monstrous becomings not as a finished analytical product but as a working critical model: an exercise in treating the fragmentation and opacity of the performing body not as a limitation but a possibility.

The Textile Black Body

In addition to cosmetic applications for early modern ‘blackface’ theatrical representation, the essay posits that performers used a variety of racial prostheses, most notably cloth and animal skins. In The Merchant of Venice, Morocco’s description of his own body as ‘shadowed livery’—that is, dyed cloth worn by a servant or apprentice—reveals a complex metatheatrical consciousness indebted to this prosthetic blackface tradition. Morocco’s identification with livery connects specifically to Lancelot, the other liveried character in the play whose servant uniform contextualizes Morocco’s corporal blackness as a sign of membership in a social underclass. The play’s mercantile ethos, reflecting John Wheeler’s assessment from A Treatise of Commerce that pervasive economic interests bring ‘all things into commerce’, creates the conditions for category violations: people are perceived as commodities, and none more insidiously than Morocco, the textile black man, read, in turn, as a powerful antecedent for post-Enlightenment constructions of race.

Magic in the Chains

In analysing an important Hindi film’s precise yet radical reconception of Othello’s famously overdetermined handkerchief in the form of a jewelled chain or ‘kamarband’, this essay focuses on media representation and gender across time and space. It demonstrates how material objects factor into the perception and definition of gendered bodies in Shakespeare’s playtexts and modern performance, using ‘comparative close analysis’ to understanding the symbolic, narrative, and political consequentiality of metamorphic things. In Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2006 Omkara’s, chains of corrupted authority, both political and domestic, have superseded the superstitious magic in the web of Othello; following the kamarband’s journey reveals complexities in each artwork’s conception of femaleness, a sustained opposition between the sexes’ moral culpability, and an alternative form of female community. Omkara reframes difference and foregrounds gendered embodiment in a culturally specific, insightful way that prompts reflection upon our critical methods and futures in cross-cultural media and gender studies.

All’s Well That Ends Well and Recipe Cultures of Knowledge

This essay reinterprets the social, sexual, and gendered meanings of Helena’s climactic moment of healing in All’s Well That Ends Well by situating the play within the early modern recipe world of letters. Just as importantly, it positions All’s Well so as to illuminate the intellectual and cultural stakes of recipe writing in the period. Shakespeare’s story of a woman’s powerful recipe, I argue, emerges within the discourse of seasoning, an intellectual matrix that entailed reflection on the human management of organic matter in and through time. In its articulation of seasoning, the recipe archive allows us to explore domestic determinations in the play’s critically noted features: its probing of eroticism and gender ideology, its construction of proof, and its concern with the conundrums of temporality.

Embodiment and the Classroom Performance

It is now a common pedagogical practice in secondary schools, colleges, and universities to incorporate performance into the Shakespearean classroom. While the ‘revolution in performance approaches to teaching Shakespeare’ has occurred, many practical questions still remain. At the heart of these practical dilemmas, we argue, is a conflicted response to the significance of our diverse student populations. According to theories for performance-based pedagogy, the student’s body plays a central role in his or her kinaesthetic processes and syntheses. Nonetheless, the current theories, methodologies, and practices of performance-based pedagogy sacrifice discussions of the student’s race, gender, ability, and sexuality in order to espouse a universalist rhetoric. While the rhetoric about the value of diversity is readily espoused, the practical implications for the ways to embody diversity in Shakespearean performance are avoided. In this essay, we discuss guidelines for intentional, explicit, and safe explorations of difference.

Constructing the Inferior Body

Christian scriptural and patristic texts posit that God imposed perpetual servitude upon the Jews as punishment for the sin of deicide. The medieval church cites this concept of Jewish inferiority in expressing concern about Jews exercising power over Christians. The inversion of the proper hierarchy between the two groups, ecclesiastical authorities feared, exposed subordinated Christians to the peril of conversion. These anxieties continue to shape relations between Christians and Jews as represented in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In those moments when Shylock is poised to exercise power over Christians, the play’s characters describe his body as inanimate, bestial, dark, and demonic in an attempt to construct a physical inferiority that will return him to his rightful place of subjection. However, Shylock’s rejection of ‘natural’ inferiority, his insistence on physical parity between Christians and Jews and Portia’s reliance on the law to enforce hierarchy, all expose this difference as constructed, not inherent.

Amazons, Turks, and Tartars in the Gesta Grayorum and The Comedy of Errors

This essay pursues the multiple and contradictory meanings of the signifier ‘Tartar’ in Elizabethan drama by parsing how its classical and historical referents were mapped onto the ‘trouble’ associated with gendered and racialized embodiment in the period, which was further mapped onto the early Anglo–Islamic encounter. It focuses on the imbricated series of cultural performances that constituted the 1594–5 Christmas revels at Gray’s Inn, subsequently published as the Gesta Grayorum: the semi-parodic allegory of the Prince of Purpoole and ‘an Ambassador from the mighty Emperor of Russia and Moscovy’; the madcap premier of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors; and the Masque of Proteus, with Queen Elizabeth in the audience. In assessing the patriarchal web of empire indexed by the Gesta Grayorum, this essay foregrounds the fraught historical embodiment of subaltern women from the Islamic world in Elizabethan England and their neglected, albeit constitutive role in its literature, including Shakespeare’s plays.

Double Falsehood

In both its source material and in later adaptations, the Cardenio plot involves an attempted rape of a servant woman while cross-dressed as a shepherd by her employer, the Master of the Flock. In almost every instance, the Master of the Flock discovers that the shepherd is really a woman before attempting to rape her. In this essay, I focus in on this moment, querying why this might be so. Juxtaposing more recent adaptations of its source materials with Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood, I analyse how these two aspects of identity—‘woman’ and ‘shepherd’—influence the impact of the assault, particularly in terms of genre. Using the lost play-text as a way to theorize other absences in our histories of rape, I argue that Cardenio maps not only our cultural willingness to define some acts of violence as rape but also our willingness to ignore others.

Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines

Media theorists have recently sought to challenge traditional conceptions of a ‘medium’ as a passive means for human ends, or an exterior supplement to an essential human core; however, they have not yet fully investigated the implications of this conceptual shift for the history of gender. This essay focuses on two key Shakespearean scenes in which female characters become tightly associated with the theatrical medium: the awakening of Queen Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale and the bed-tricks of All’s Well That Ends Well. While these scenes link theatrical devices with qualities conventionally gendered feminine (artificiality, exteriority, and embodiment), they also transvalue the traditionally negative associations of that feminization, in part by reimagining the workings of mediation itself. Shakespeare’s plays thus offer nascent forms of media theory that are deeply relevant to our contemporary world.

Glossing and T*pping

Reading a series of textual cruxes and glosses in Othello editions, the essay refocuses attention on the 1622–3 printed texts’ description of what we would call ‘sexual intercourse’, and the way in which modern editions attempt to correct/standardize uses of the sexual verb top to tup. At stake are notions of sexuality, sodomy discourse in relation to early modern ‘race’ and human–animal distinctions, power and positionality in historical sexual practices, the relation of textual ‘gloss’ and textual ‘crux’ in Shakespeare editions, and notions of character and coherence in Shakespeare’s plays. The essay argues for integrating scholarship on the intersecting histories of race, gender, and sexuality into editorial work—work often assumed to be prior to criticism and cultural history.