I have known Gail Paster since I was a graduate student but only in the past decade has it been my good fortune to work for and alongside her at Shakespeare Quarterly. Gail served as Editor of the journal from 1997 to 2009 and 2013 to 2017; thereafter to the present, she has been one of two consulting editors. For some time now, I have served the journal in the same Consulting Editor capacity. It is my belief that, more so than most professional journals, SQ nurtures submissions into publications. At least this is what I have found under the leadership of David Schalkwyk, then Gail, and now Jeremy Lopez. But it is Gail who is my subject here. Gail, who after twenty years at SQ reported that she had not in the least “tired of the process of reading and responding to every manuscript submitted to the journal.” Gail, whose conscientiousness, scrupulousness, abiding commitment to our field of study, and consistently patient and encouraging way with authors has always impressed me. Gail, whose seemingly ingrained inclination to root for success surfaces in in-house communications like these: “I decided to read this essay biased toward its virtues.” “I would ask you to read these essays in a kindly spirit.” “While it is easy to make the excellent the enemy of the good, I will say that no essay is as good as it could be.” Gail has consistently asked me to reread essays not so much with an eye toward acceptance or rejection but toward “making it publishable”—not so much to identify its flaws as to identify “what is fixable.” Her criteria for accepting an essay add up to a nonrestrictive kind of excellence: hence, “I never worry that an essay fails to change the play if it deepens it one way or the other”; or, “this is not to say that I buy the author’s interpretation altogether, but I have never required that—only that a reading make me think hard.”
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It is my great pleasure to introduce this special issue in honor of Gail Kern Paster, who provided field-shaping leadership of Shakespeare Quarterly and its home institution the Folger Shakespeare Library, and whose scholarly work has given us a powerful language and methodology for thinking about the relation between mind, body, and environment in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I am grateful to Bruce R. Smith, Evelyn Tribble, Paul Yachnin, and Julian Yates for accepting my invitation to contribute to this issue and for producing a set of vivid, imaginative essays that demonstrate the range and depth of Gail’s influence. Most broadly, the aim of Gail’s work is (as she puts it near the beginning of Humoring the Body) “to look for traces of a historical phenomenology in the language of affect in early modern drama in order that readers of that drama and other texts of the period may begin to recover some of the historical particularity of early modern emotional self-experience.”1 It is a testament to the success of this project that, in reading a sentence like the one I have just quoted, we now barely register its staggering ambition. Gail’s scholarship has made the excavation of affect in a distant historical moment—the recovery of “lived practices of early modern cosmology” (20) and the assessment of Shakespeare’s “idiosyncratic understanding of contemporary psychophysiology” in relation to the “intellectual framework of his cultural moment” (23)—not only a locally productive form of cultural archaeology, but a pervasive, vital methodology for the interpretation of early modern literature in relation to our own historical moment and our own sense of ourselves. As Gail would be the first to point out, her scholarship has not accomplished this feat on its own; rather, it has flourished in sustained dialogue with a vast array of historians and theorists of the emotions, the body, and the theater who have inspired her and been inspired by her. At once skeptical and receptive in its approach to the texts it encounters, Gail’s work is consistently generative to those who encounter it. The dialogic quality of her scholarship, and its continuing ability to push early modern studies in new directions, is everywhere on display in this issue’s four essays: from Bruce Smith’s listening for the sound of early modern “complexion,” to Lyn Tribble’s description of the atmospherics of magic circles, to Paul Yachnin’s anatomy of bodily shame in the Sonnets, to Julian Yates’s discussion of the intersection between affect and apocalypse in King Lear and some of its distant descendants.
{"title":"From the Editor","authors":"Jeremy Lopez","doi":"10.1093/sq/quad001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad001","url":null,"abstract":"It is my great pleasure to introduce this special issue in honor of Gail Kern Paster, who provided field-shaping leadership of Shakespeare Quarterly and its home institution the Folger Shakespeare Library, and whose scholarly work has given us a powerful language and methodology for thinking about the relation between mind, body, and environment in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I am grateful to Bruce R. Smith, Evelyn Tribble, Paul Yachnin, and Julian Yates for accepting my invitation to contribute to this issue and for producing a set of vivid, imaginative essays that demonstrate the range and depth of Gail’s influence. Most broadly, the aim of Gail’s work is (as she puts it near the beginning of Humoring the Body) “to look for traces of a historical phenomenology in the language of affect in early modern drama in order that readers of that drama and other texts of the period may begin to recover some of the historical particularity of early modern emotional self-experience.”1 It is a testament to the success of this project that, in reading a sentence like the one I have just quoted, we now barely register its staggering ambition. Gail’s scholarship has made the excavation of affect in a distant historical moment—the recovery of “lived practices of early modern cosmology” (20) and the assessment of Shakespeare’s “idiosyncratic understanding of contemporary psychophysiology” in relation to the “intellectual framework of his cultural moment” (23)—not only a locally productive form of cultural archaeology, but a pervasive, vital methodology for the interpretation of early modern literature in relation to our own historical moment and our own sense of ourselves. As Gail would be the first to point out, her scholarship has not accomplished this feat on its own; rather, it has flourished in sustained dialogue with a vast array of historians and theorists of the emotions, the body, and the theater who have inspired her and been inspired by her. At once skeptical and receptive in its approach to the texts it encounters, Gail’s work is consistently generative to those who encounter it. The dialogic quality of her scholarship, and its continuing ability to push early modern studies in new directions, is everywhere on display in this issue’s four essays: from Bruce Smith’s listening for the sound of early modern “complexion,” to Lyn Tribble’s description of the atmospherics of magic circles, to Paul Yachnin’s anatomy of bodily shame in the Sonnets, to Julian Yates’s discussion of the intersection between affect and apocalypse in King Lear and some of its distant descendants.","PeriodicalId":39634,"journal":{"name":"SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY","volume":"200 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135185651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
At the beginning of “The Body and Its Passions,” Gail Kern Paster observes that “passions operated upon the body very much as strong movements of wind or water operate upon the natural world.”1 To Shigehisa Kuriyama’s claim that the “history of the body is ultimately a history of ways of inhabiting the world,” Paster adds “the chiastic corollary that this history is also about how the world inhabits the body.”2 Early modern actors were experts in forms of bodily inhabitation, aware of the permeability of their bodies, yet also adept at managing the flow of spirits between body and world. Joseph Roach has argued that the actor’s skill allows him to manipulate rather than be overwhelmed by external and internal forces: “A passion, once unleashed, cannot be suppressed, but it can be shaped into outwardly expressive forms. An oratorical gesture, a prescribed pattern of action, serves as a pre-existing mold into which this molten passion can be poured.”3 Passions are powerful forces, but actors are trained to manage, control, and unleash them; this training is not simply an individual undertaking but also involves the creation and manipulation of what we might call the theatrical atmosphere.
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Good Camillo, Your changed complexions are to me a mirror Which shows me mine changed, too; for I must be A party in this alteration, finding Myself thus altered with’t. The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.378–821 Thanks to the work of Gail Kern Paster, twenty-first-century interpreters of Shakespeare can appreciate the complex physical, psychological, and theatrical transactions in Act 1, scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale when Polixenes reads Camillo’s face and anticipates the dire news that Camillo is about to tell him: Leontes has ordered Camillo to murder Polixenes. The “changed complexions” (plural) that Polixenes observes in Camillo are visible not only in the muscles of his face but also in his skin tone. The sanguine hues of Camillo’s customary graciousness have given way to the paleness of fear and grief. Polixenes, seeing mirror-like his own condition in Camillo’s face, undergoes the same shifts in facial musculature and skin tone. These visible signs of emotion are the result of changes in body chemistry, as each man’s spiritus communicates the passions of fear and grief throughout his body. The visible signs of fear and grief are accompanied by somatic sensations of heat yielding to coldness, of moistness yielding to dryness, of relaxed muscles yielding to tight muscles.2 Also present, perhaps, in the fiction of The Winter’s Tale are differences in complexion due to different climates: the fairness of Bohemia versus the swarthiness of Sicily.3
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The outbreak of civil mutiny in Rome can be seen, then, to result not so much from the disclosure of Caesar’s “will”—his maleness—as from the disclosure of his wounds, his femaleness, and from the affective power these wounds have in flowing to transform Antony from part to whole, from Caesar’s limb to motivated Orphic speaker, causing stones to rise up. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed1 Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? here’s three on ’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art. King Lear, 3.4.101–1082
{"title":"Shame and Solidarity in the Sonnets","authors":"Paul Yachnin","doi":"10.1093/sq/quad006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quad006","url":null,"abstract":"The outbreak of civil mutiny in Rome can be seen, then, to result not so much from the disclosure of Caesar’s “will”—his maleness—as from the disclosure of his wounds, his femaleness, and from the affective power these wounds have in flowing to transform Antony from part to whole, from Caesar’s limb to motivated Orphic speaker, causing stones to rise up. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed1 Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha? here’s three on ’s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork’d animal as thou art. King Lear, 3.4.101–1082","PeriodicalId":39634,"journal":{"name":"SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135185654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T HIS ESSAY FOCUSES ON K ING L EAR , but a passage from Macbeth epitomizes
{"title":"King Lear and Blessing","authors":"Kenneth J E Graham","doi":"10.1093/sq/quac061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quac061","url":null,"abstract":"T HIS ESSAY FOCUSES ON K ING L EAR , but a passage from Macbeth epitomizes","PeriodicalId":39634,"journal":{"name":"SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY","volume":"73 1","pages":"303 - 332"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42094917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pericles's Humming Waters: Nonhuman Agency, Textual Criticism, and the Practice of Material Ecocriticism","authors":"Laurence J W Publicover","doi":"10.1093/sq/quac060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quac060","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39634,"journal":{"name":"SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY","volume":"73 1","pages":"280 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49615735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shakespeare’s ‘Lady Editors’: A New History of the Shakespearean Text. By Molly G. Yarn","authors":"K. Scheil","doi":"10.1093/sq/quac066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quac066","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39634,"journal":{"name":"SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46304476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shakespeare, Violence and Early Modern Europe by Andrew Hiscock (review)","authors":"Matteo Pangallo","doi":"10.1093/sq/quac068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quac068","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39634,"journal":{"name":"SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY","volume":"73 1","pages":"343 - 345"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49316743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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