Abstract
In Shakespeare’s King Lear, after Gloucester is viciously blinded by Regan and Cornwall, he is turned out of the house to wander comfortless and alone. Deceived by Lear’s children and by his own bastard son, Edmund, he recognizes the full extent of their treachery only when his eyes are brutally destroyed. Gloucester cries out that he has no more need for mortal vision: “I haue no way, and therefore want no eyes: / I stumbled when I saw” (TLN 2199–200; 4.1.18–19). Bloody mutilation is here presented as potent reflection on the play’s larger themes: it is only when Gloucester’s eyes are ripped out that he can finally “see” the truth. Modern theatrical productions underscore this convergence of the literal and the figurative when they creatively stage the episode to avoid showing the blinding itself. Directors often present Gloucester bound to a chair that is then tipped back for the gruesome act. Just as the obliteration of physical vision ultimately enhances his perceptions, spectators who cannot literally view the violent action see its representation all the more clearly in their “mind’s eye.”
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Notes
Translation in Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, eds., The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1983), 105.
John Spalding Gatton, “‘There must be blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 87.
See especially work associated with the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project, overviews of which are available in Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean, eds., REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006);
and Peter Holland, “Theatre without Drama: Reading REED,” in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 43–67.
See, for example, John H. Astington, Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010);
Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill, eds., Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
Joanne Rochester, Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010);
and Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
See, for instance, Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda, eds., Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011);
Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008);
and Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
On performance as that which disappears, see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993);
for a recent counterargument, see Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011).
See, for example, Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999);
and Lena Cowen Orlin, ed., Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
Object-centered scholarship has thus been criticized by some for having a conservative streak. Although some working in this area have strong Marxist roots, the field as a whole has moved away from questions of political ideology and class conflict that informed the cultural materialism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. See Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 191–205;
Crystal Bartolovich, “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be? A Response to Peter Stallybrass’s ‘The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things,’” Early Modern Culture 1, no. 1 (2000), http://emc.eserver.org/1–1/bartolovich.html;
and Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 1–25.
In theatre studies, Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), usefully analyzes contemporary performance from a cultural materialist perspective.
See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). “Performativity” in Butler is not the same thing as performance.
On the intersection between the two, see Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds., Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995);
and W. B. Worthen, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA 113 (1998): 1093–107.
On theatre as a semiotic system, see Marvin A. Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990);
Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002);
Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992);
Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982);
and Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
See also Jean Alter, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990),
discussed further in chapter 4, and Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), which analyzes semiotic crises onstage.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge; and, The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 131.
When I do use the term “Renaissance,” I refer specifically to this humanist tradition. On the difficulties of both terms, see Jennifer Summit and David Wallace, eds., “Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization,” special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (2007).
On the cultural authority of drama as text versus performance, see W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996);
Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
and Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See, in particular, Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, rev. ed. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1988);
and Tim Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).
On notions of the popular in theatre and performance studies, see Victor Emeljanow, “Editorial,” Popular Entertainment Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–5.
On historical phenomenology’s theoretical premises and stakes, see Bruce R. Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA 115 (2000): 318–29;
and Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
For a good introduction to early modern affect studies more generally, see Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
On the overlapping field of cognitive studies in theatre, see Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Other references are too numerous to note.
See, for example, Stephen Cohen, ed., Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007);
Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007): 558–69;
and Mark David Rasmussen, ed., Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Working within and beyond historical formalism, see also Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007);
and Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Among innumerable examples, see especially Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008);
and Peter Stallybrass et al., “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 379–419.
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 18.
Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 385.
Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71.
Roslyn Lander Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 29–30;
and Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 103–4.
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24–25; and Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 213.
Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
See also Erne, “The Popularity of Shakespeare in Print,” Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009): 12–29;
and Zachary Lesser, Peter Stallybrass, and G. K. Hunter, “The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (2008): 371–420.
Mary Thomas Crane, “What Was Performance?” Criticism 43, no. 2 (2001): 169–87.
Translation in Tiffany Stern, “‘On each Wall and Corner Poast’: Playbills, Title-pages, and Advertising in Early Modern London,” English Literary Renaissance 36 (2006): 66.
Charles Read Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 6.
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 158; emphasis in original.
William N. West, “When Is the Jig Up—and What Is It Up To?” in Locating the Queen’s Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing, ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 205.
Clare Williams, ed. and trans., Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, 1599 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 166.
Transcribed in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage , 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 4:340–41.
Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, eds., Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 13–14.
Alan Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance (London: Macmillan, 1981), 68.
John Russell Brown, Shakespeare’s Plays in Performance (New York: Applause, 1993), 179–80.
Frederick Kiefer, Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 114–15;
and Amanda Eubanks Winkler, O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note: Music for Witches, the Melancholic, and the Mad on the Seventeenth-Century English Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 25–40.
Quoted in Vanessa Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 50.
John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–1750 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 226.
Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 127.
For further discussion, see Erika T. Lin, “Popular Festivity and the Early Modern Stage: The Case of George a Greene,” Theatre Journal 61 (2009): 271–97.
Records of Early English Drama: Somerset, ed. James Stokes, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 421.
For the most recent work on this subject, see Phebe Jensen, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
and Paul Whitfield White, Drama and Religion in English Provincial Society, 1485–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 248.
Philip Stubbes, The anatomie of abuses contayning a discouerie, or briefe summarie of such notable vices and imperfections, as now raigne in many Christian countreyes of the worlde: but (especiallie) in a verie famous ilande called Ailgna … (London, 1583), M2r. On the popular pamphlet’s subsequent reprints, see Margaret Jane Kidnie, ed., Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002).
Leonard Tennenhouse, “Strategies of State and Political Plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VIII,” in Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd ed., ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 123–25.
On the coranto, see Brissenden, Shakespeare and the Dance, 113. On the galliard and volta, see Peter Walls, “Common Sixteenth-Century Dance Forms: Some Further Notes,” Early Music 2 (1974): 164–65.
Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 70.
For recent work on contemporary performance that has aimed to redefine what counts as a theatrical event, see, for example, Vicki Ann Cremona et al., eds., Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004);
Temple Hauptfleisch et al., eds., Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007);
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London: Routledge, 2006);
and Willmar Sauter, The Theatrical Event: Dynamics of Performance and Perception (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000). Although these scholars focus on performance activities that do not rely on dramatic narratives or scripts and although they consider the fluid relationship between spectating and performing, the historical context of their investigations is significantly different enough that many of their insights are not quite applicable to early modern theatre.
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© 2012 Erika T. Lin
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Lin, E.T. (2012). Introduction. In: Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006509_1
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