Abstract
One of the most bizarre episodes of dismemberment in early modern theatre occurs in The Tragical Reign of Selimus. When Acomat tortures Bajazet’s ambassador Aga, he “[p]uls out his eyes” and “cut[s] of[f] his hands,” 1 as the stage directions tell us. He then commands Aga,
[Aco.] Now in that sort go tell thy Fmperour [sic]
That if himselfe had but bene in thy place,
I would haue vs’d him crueller then thee:
Here take thy hands: I know thou lou’st them wel.
Opens his bosome, and puts them in.
Which hand is this? right? or left? canst thou tell?
Aga. I know not which it is, but tis my hand. (F3r; lines 1432–38)
The word bosom, in early modern usage, referred not only to a part of the body but also to the “part of the dress which covers the breast; also the space included between the breast and its covering,” and it was specifically “[c]onsidered as the receptacle for money or letters, formerly answering to modern use of ‘pocket.’” 2 This grotesque bit of stage business underscores Aga’s loss of agency: the ambassador’s hands no longer carry out Bajazet’s will but are themselves objects to be carried. The literalness of this exchange is accentuated when Aga subsequently returns home. He calls upon Bajazet and his lords to “witnesse” his bodily mutilation, then says, “VVitnesse the present that he sends to thee, / Open my bosome, there you shall it see” (F3v; lines 1476–77, 1485–86).
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Notes
The Tragical Reign of Selimus, 1594, ed. W[illy] Bang, Malone Society Reprints (London: Malone Society/Chiswick Press, 1909), F2v, F3r; lines 1415, 1431. Quotations from this facsimile of the 1594 quarto have been cross-checked against T. G., The tragedy of Selimus Emperour of the Turkes (London, 1638).
Christopher Marlowe, The tragicall history of the life and death of Doctor Faustus (London, 1616), B-text, G2v; David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, eds., Doctor Faustus A- and B-texts (1604, 1616): Christopher Marlowe and His Collaborator and Revisers, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 4.6.125.
See Alan C. Dessen, Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989);
and G. Harold Metz, “Stage History of Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977): 154–69.
See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds., The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), based on Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor’s Oxford text. The earlier Oxford version edited by Eugene Waith changes “these things” to “this” but keeps “teeth.” The Riverside and the Arden 3 editions cut the third line after “employed” but retain “teeth.”
Eugene M. Waith, ed., Titus Andronicus, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984);
G. Blakemore Evans et al., eds., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997);
and Jonathan Bate, ed., Titus Andronicus, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (London: Routledge, 1995).
For other discussions of the hand-in-teeth moment, see Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 94–95, 242n5;
and Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 74–76.
See, for example, Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 52–85;
Michael Neill, “‘Amphitheatres in the Body’: Playing with Hands on the Shakespearian Stage,” Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995): 23–50;
Heather James, “Cultural Disintegration in Titus Andronicus : Mutilating Titus, Vergil and Rome,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 123–40;
and Gillian Murray Kendall, “‘Lend Me Thy Hand’: Metaphor and Mayhem in Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 299–316.
Homer Swander, “No Exit for a Dead Body: What to Do with a Scripted Corpse?” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5 (1991): 139.
See also Mariko Ichikawa, “What to Do with a Corpse? Physical Reality and the Fictional World in the Shakespearean Theatre,” Theatre Research International 29 (2004): 201–15. Early modern productions apparently had similar constraints. According to one writer, a pre-Interregnum performance generated much laughter when one actor “brandisht his Sword & made his Exit; ne’re minding to bring off his dead men; which they perceiving, crauld into the Tyreing house, at which Fowler grew angry, and told ’em, Dogs you should have laine there till you had been fetcht off; and so they crauld out again, which gave the People such an occasion of Laughter, they cry’d that again[,] that again, that again.” John Tatham, Knavery in all trades, or, The coffee-house a comedy: as it was acted in the Christmas holidays by several apprentices with great applause (London, 1664), E1r.
Susan Dwyer Amussen, “Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 9.
See J. H. Baker, “Criminal Courts and Procedure at Common Law 1550–1800,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. J. S. Cockburn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 15–48;
and J. A. Sharpe, Judicial Punishment in England (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 18–49.
Clare Williams, ed. and trans., Thomas Platter’s Travels in England, 1599 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 155.
Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 153 (1996): 77.
On funeral practices, see Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (London, 1587; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 187.
John H. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 47.
Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 222.
The horrible murther of a young boy of three yeres of age, whose sister had her tongue cut out and how it pleased God to reueale the offendors, by giuing speech to the tongueles childe … (London, 1606), B2r. Tongues are repeatedly linked with the revelation of murder, an association that extends to theatre, too, as we saw in Titus Andronicus and The Spanish Tragedy. On tongues, see Carla Mazzio, “Sins of the Tongue,” in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), 53–79.
On lay investigators, see Lorna Hutson, “Rethinking the ‘Spectacle of the Scaffold’: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy,” Representations 89 (2005): 30–58. On “searchers,” see Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, 254–61.
Translations 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), 102–3, 105.
Véronique Plesch, “Notes for the Staging of a Late Medieval Passion Play,” in Material Culture and Medieval Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1999), 80.
Philip Massinger and Thomas Dekker, T he virgin martir a tragedie. As it hath bin diuers times publickely acted with great applause, by the seruants of his Maiesties Reuels (London, 1622), K2v; John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill, Malone Society Reprints (1619; London: Malone Society, 1980), 94; and Gervase Markham and William Sampson, The true tragedy of Herod and Antipater with the death of faire Marriam … publiquely acted (with great applause) at the Red Bull, by the Company of his Maiesties Reuels (London, 1622), L4r. See also the beheading of Isabella in John Marston and William Barksted, The insatiate countesse A tragedie: acted at VVhite-Fryers (London, 1613), I2r.
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), 86.
Quoted in Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 184.
“The Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” in Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
Eric Bentley, The Life of Drama (New York: Atheneum, 1964), 158.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 42.
Frances Teague, Shakespeare’s Speaking Properties (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1991), 17–18.
For further discussion of props, see Andrew Sofer’s excellent study, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
On beggary and theatre, see William C. Carroll, Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996);
and Paola Pugliatti, Beggary and the Theatre in Early Modern England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003).
Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
On laughter and tears in Titus Andronicus, see Matthew Steggle, Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 128–31.
R. A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 320.
See Philip H. Highfill Jr., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), 14:433. The account from the Universal Journal is dated December 11, 1723, shortly after the show initially premiered on November 26.
Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 219. For an interesting exception, see Fletcher and Massinger, Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt, 94, where an onstage decapitation is marked only by a long dash.
David Underdown, “Regional Cultures? Local Variation in Popular Culture during the Early Modern Period,” in Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 37–39.
Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 154.
Arthur Freeman, “The ‘Tapster Manuscript’: An Analogue of Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth Part One,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 6 (1997): 98; ellipses and brackets in Freeman’s transcription.
Note, too, that the horse-courser’s group is led by Robin the clown, as indicated in the original quarto’s speech tags and stage directions. On the clown’s adoption of the Vice’s dramaturgical techniques, including his instigation of games, see David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–10.
Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, 3rd ed., rev. S. Schoenbaum and Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (New York: Routledge, 1989).
On baiting in relation to discourses of human and beast, see Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006);
Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000);
and Fudge , Ruth Gilbert, and S. J. Wiseman, eds., At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999).
Hutton, Stations of the Sun, 152. Carlisle hosted football matches as well; see Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, ed. Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 25.
For related arguments about the social functions of sport, see Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Sport, Politics, and Literature in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003).
See Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 105 (1984): 79–113; and Sharpe, Judicial Punishment in England, 18–49.
Amussen, “Punishment, Discipline, and Power,” 12. For other accounts of this incident, see Lake and Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric,” 102; and David Underdown, Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 197–98.
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles with introduction and notes by Bernard Knox (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 11.166–70.
John Webster, The white diuel, or, The tragedy of Paulo Giordano Vrsini, Duke of Brachiano with the life and death of Vittoria Corombona the famous Venetian curtizan. Acted by the Queenes Maiesties Seruants (London, 1612), G2v; John Webster, The White Devil, ed. Christina Luckyj, The New Mermaids (London: A&C Black; New York: Norton, 1996), 4.2.136–37.
Patricia Palmer, “‘An headlesse Ladie’ and ‘a horses loade of heades’: Writing the Beheading,” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 25–57.
See Giles E. Dawson, “London’s Bull-Baiting and Bear-Baiting Arena in 1562,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 98–99.
For an overview of baiting, see Oscar Brownstein, “The Popularity of Baiting in England before 1600: A Study in Social and Theatrical History,” Educational Theatre Journal 21 (1969): 237–50.
On baiting and playing, see Brownstein, “Why Didn’t Burbage Lease the Beargarden? A Conjecture in Comparative Architecture,” in The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch, 1576–1598, ed. Herbert Berry (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979), 81–96.
Brownstein, A “Popularity of Baiting,” 240–44; S. P. Cerasano, “The Master of the Bears in Art and Enterprise,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 5 (1991): 195–209;
and Andrew Gurr, “Bears and Players: Philip Henslowe’s Double Acts,” Shakespeare Bulletin 22, no. 4 (2004): 31–41.
See, for instance, Stephen Dickey, “Shakespeare’s Mastiff Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 255–75;
Jason Scott-Warren, “When Theaters Were Bear-Gardens; or, What’s at Stake in the Comedy of Humors,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2003): 63–82;
Rebecca Ann Bach, “Bearbaiting, Dominion, and Colonialism,” in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance, ed. Joyce Green MacDonald (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 19–35;
and Tobias Hug, “‘You should go to Hockley in the Hole, and to Marybone, child, to learn valour’: On the Social Logic of Animal Baiting in Early Modern London,” Renaissance Journal 2, no. 1 (2004): 17–26.
Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), unfortunately appeared too late to be taken into account here.
From an early modern advertisement for a baiting, reprinted in W. W. Greg, ed., Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907), 106.
John Webster, The tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy As it was presented priuatly, at the Black-Friers; and publiquely at the Globe, by the Kings Maiesties Seruants … (London, 1623), I2v; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, 2nd ed., ed. John Russell Brown, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 4.1.111–15.
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© 2012 Erika T. Lin
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Lin, E.T. (2012). Artful Sport: Violence, Dismemberment, and Games in Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, and Doctor Faustus. In: Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006509_6
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