This book documents the changing representation of subjectivity in Medieval and Early Modern English drama by intertextually exploring discourses of 'self-speaking', including soliloquy. Pre-modern ideas about language are combined with recent models of subject formation, especially Lacan's, to theorize and analyze the stage 'self' as a variable linguistic construct. Both the approach itself and the conclusions it generates significantly diverge from the standard New Historicist/Cultural Materialist narrative of subjectivity. Plays range from the Corpus Christi pageants to the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, with Shakespeare a recurrent focus and Hamlet, inevitably, the pivotal text.
"Paulson highlights a paradox of scholarship on medieval concepts of the self: The concept of an 'interior' self that is to some extent hidden from an 'external' world is uniquely modern, and hence alien to the medieval period; nevertheless, studies of the medieval idea of the self still privilege this modern binary in the language they use. What is needed, Paulson argues, is a new way of speaking about the medieval self that does not privilege anachronistic terms and concepts. To provide this, Paulson turns to the medieval morality plays--performances which depict selves being created through performative acts--to construct a more appropriate form of discourse"--
The twelve essays in Selfhood on the Early Modern English Stage analyse the influences that shaped the fictional constructs that inhabited the drama of the early modern period. The contributors, all specialists in the field working in France and England, offer a wide spectrum of views and discuss a variety of dramatic texts ranging from late medieval cycle plays and interludes of the Tudor period, to plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Tourneur and Jonson. The early modern stage self emerges out of this collection as the site of a rich confluence of discursive and historical forces existing beyond the theatre itself. Three essays in the first section reveal how abstract figures like Mundus and Mankind gradually became endowed with personal motives and personalizing traits which brought into existence stage beings with a capacity for emotion. In the second section, three essays deal with specific cultural factors that influenced the representation of selfhood in John Lyly’s Alexander, in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and in a selection of Stuart court masques presented at Whitehall. The third section offers new insights into the composition of Hamlet as a dramatized personality; the fourth investigates the way in which the poet-playwright’s autobiographical impulses may have helped in the construction of early modern stage selves; the final, fifth section explores the kaleidoscopic sources of the royal protagonists in Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me, and Shakespeare’s Richard III. This collection of essays seeks to add a further contribution to the growing body of criticism that investigates the multi-facetted, multi-layered construction of early modern subjectivity.
Despite attempts to suppress early women's speech, this study demonstrates that women were still actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were both complicit with the patriarchal ideology whilst also undermining it.
All of the essays in this collection investigate and extrapolate understandings of the strange. In presenting contrasts and analogies between diverse kinds of estrangement, the volume reveals an interplay of thematic and stylistic discourses that sheds new light on the place of word and self in English Renaissance writings, and offers a vital reinterpretation of early modern texts.
The essays in Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660, consider diverse historical contexts for writing about 'strangeness'. They draw on current practices of reading to present contrasts and analogies within and between various social understandings. In so doing they reveal an interplay of thematic and stylistic modes that tells us a great deal about how, and why, certain aspects of life and thinking were 'estranged' in sixteenth and seventeenth century thinking. The collection's unique strength is that it makes specific bridges between contemporary perspectives and early modern connotations of strangeness and inhibition. The subjects of these essays are 'strange' to our ways of thinking because of their obvious distance from us in time and culture. And yet, curiously, far from being entirely alien to these texts, some of the most modern thinking-about paradigms, texts, concepts-connects with the early modern in unexpected ways. Milton meets the contemporary 'competent reader', Wittgenstein meets Robert Cawdrey, Shakespeare embraces the teenager, and Marvell matches wits with French mathematician René Thom. Additionally, the early modern texts posit their own 'others', or sites of estrangement-Moorishness, Persian art, even the human body-with which they perform their own astonishing maneuvers of estrangement and alignment. In reading Renaissance works from our own time and inviting them to reflect upon our own time, Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660 offers a vital reinterpretation of early modern texts.
"The prevalent worldview of early modern England, shaped by Protestantism, dismissed magical belief as an ideological delusion inherent to Catholicism, while also encouraging a strong sense of individualism, through which a new masculinity found expression. This study asks why, then, did magical self-empowerment retain such a hold on that society's imagination?"--Provided by publisher.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an international volume published every year in hardcover, containing essays and studies as well as book reviews of the many significant books and essays dealing with the cultural history of medieval and early modern England as expressed by and realized in its drama exclusive of Shakespeare.
This is the first book to deploy the methods and ensemble of questions from Afro-pessimism to engage and interrogate the methods of Early Modern English studies. Using contemporary Afro-pessimist theories to provide a foundation for structural analyses of race in the Early Modern Period, it engages the arguments for race as a fluid construction of human identity by addressing how race in Early Modern England functioned not only as a marker of human identity, but also as an a priori constituent of human subjectivity. Chapman argues that Blackness is the marker of social death that allows for constructions of human identity to become transmutable based on the impossibility of recognition and incorporation for Blackness into humanity. Using dramatic texts such as Othello, Titus Andronicus, and other Early Modern English plays both popular and lesser known, the book shifts the binary away from the currently accepted standard of white/non-white that defines "otherness" in the period and examines race in Early Modern England from the prospective of a non-black/black antagonism. The volume corrects the Afro-pessimist assumption that the Triangle Slave Trade caused a rupture between Blackness and humanity. By locating notions of Black inhumanity in England prior to chattel slavery, the book positions the Triangle Trade as a result of, rather than the cause of, Black inhumanity. It also challenges the common scholarly assumption that all varying types of human identity in Early Modern England were equally fluid by arguing that Blackness functioned as an immutable constant. Through the use of structural analysis, this volume works to simplify and demystify notions of race in Renaissance England by arguing that race is not only a marker of human identity, but a structural antagonism between those engaged in human civil society opposed to those who are socially dead. It will be an essential volume for those with interest in Renaissance Literature and Culture, Shakespeare, Contemporary Performance Theory, Black Studies, and Ethnic Studies.
Sounds are a vital dimension of transcultural encounters in the early modern period. Using the concept of the soundwave as a vibratory, uncanny, and transformative force, Jennifer Linhart Wood examines how sounds of foreign otherness are experienced and interpreted in cross-cultural interactions around the globe. Many of these same sounds are staged in the sonic laboratory of the English theater: rattles were shaken at Whitehall Palace and in Brazil; bells jingled in an English masque and in the New World; the Dallam organ resounded at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul and at King’s College, Cambridge; and the drum thundered across India and throughout London theaters. This book offers a new way to conceptualize intercultural contact by arguing that sounds of otherness enmesh bodies and objects in assemblages formed by sonic events, calibrating foreign otherness with the familiar self on the same frequency of vibration.
