Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.07
R. Sawyer
This essay presents a posthumanist reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, two plays which feature a scientist/magus who attempts to control his environment through personal agency. After detailing the analogy between the agency of posthuman figures and the workings of computerized writing machines, as Katherine Hayles has proposed, my essay shows how Kott’s writing, especially his notion of the “Grand Mechanism” of history, anticipates the posthumanist theories that are currently dominating literary assessments. His critique of The Tempest makes this idea perfectly clear when he disputes the standard notion that Prospero represents a medieval magus; he instead argues that Prospero was more akin to Leonardo DaVinci, “a master of mechanics and hydraulics,” one who would have embraced revolutionary advances in “astronomy” as well as “anatomy” (1974: 321).
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.08
Anne Sophie Refskou
When Lady Anne accuses Richard of cruelty in the wooing scene of act one in Richard III, she claims that even the fiercest beast will demonstrate some degree of pity. Her attempt to categorize Richard as somehow both less than human and less than a beast, however, leaves her vulnerable to Richard’s pithy retort that he knows no pity “and therefore [is] no beast” (1:2:71-2). The dialogue swiftly moves on, but the relation between the emotional phenomenon known as pity or compassion and the nonhuman, briefly raised in these two lines, remains unresolved. Recent scholarship at the intersection of early modern studies, historical animal studies and posthumanism has demonstrated ways in which the human-animal binary is often less than clearly articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Building on such work, and adding perspectives from the history of the emotions, I look closely at the exchange between Anne and Richard as characteristic of pre-Cartesian confusion about the emotional disposition—in particular compassion—of animals. I argue that such confusion can in fact be traced throughout Richard III and elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon and that paying attention to it unsettles the more familiar notion of compassion as a human species distinction and offers a new way to read the early modern nonhuman.
{"title":"“No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity”: Compassion and the Nonhuman in Richard III","authors":"Anne Sophie Refskou","doi":"10.18778/2083-8530.24.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.24.08","url":null,"abstract":"When Lady Anne accuses Richard of cruelty in the wooing scene of act one in Richard III, she claims that even the fiercest beast will demonstrate some degree of pity. Her attempt to categorize Richard as somehow both less than human and less than a beast, however, leaves her vulnerable to Richard’s pithy retort that he knows no pity “and therefore [is] no beast” (1:2:71-2). The dialogue swiftly moves on, but the relation between the emotional phenomenon known as pity or compassion and the nonhuman, briefly raised in these two lines, remains unresolved. Recent scholarship at the intersection of early modern studies, historical animal studies and posthumanism has demonstrated ways in which the human-animal binary is often less than clearly articulated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Building on such work, and adding perspectives from the history of the emotions, I look closely at the exchange between Anne and Richard as characteristic of pre-Cartesian confusion about the emotional disposition—in particular compassion—of animals. I argue that such confusion can in fact be traced throughout Richard III and elsewhere in the Shakespeare canon and that paying attention to it unsettles the more familiar notion of compassion as a human species distinction and offers a new way to read the early modern nonhuman.","PeriodicalId":40600,"journal":{"name":"Multicultural Shakespeare-Translation Appropriation and Performance","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84764320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.06
The paper proposes to appreciate the play’s butcheries as an incision into the unstable character of the category of the human. The vividness of the “strange images of death” is thus analysed with reference to the cultural poetics of Elizabethan theatre including its multifarious proximity to the bear-baiting arenas and execution scaffolds. The cluster of period’s cross-currents is subsequently expanded to incorporate the London shambles and its presumed resonance for the reception of Macbeth. Themes explored in the article magnify the relatedness between human and animals, underscore the porosity of the soon to turn modern paradigms and reflect upon the way Shakespeare might have played on their malleability in order to enhance the theatrical experience of the early 17th century. Finally, the questionable authority of Galenic anatomy in the pre- Cartesian era serves as a supplementary and highly speculative thread meant to suggest further research venues.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.09
Darlena Ciraulo
Albert Lewis Kanter launched Classic Comics in 1941, a series of comic books that retold classic literature for a young audience. Five of Shakespeare’s celebrated plays appear in the collection. The popularity of Classics Illustrated encouraged Seaboard Publishing to issue a competitive brand, Stories by Famous Authors Illustrated (1949-51), which retold three Shakespearean dramas. Although both these enterprises aimed to reinforce a humanist perspective of education based on Western literature, the classic comics belie a Posthuman aesthetic by presenting Shakespearean characters in scenes and postures that recall Golden Age superheroes. By examining the Shakespearean covers of Classic Illustrated and Stories by Famous Authors, this essay explores how Shakespearean characters are reimagined as Superhuman in strength and power.
{"title":"Superhero Shakespeare in Golden Age Comics","authors":"Darlena Ciraulo","doi":"10.18778/2083-8530.24.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.24.09","url":null,"abstract":"Albert Lewis Kanter launched Classic Comics in 1941, a series of comic books that retold classic literature for a young audience. Five of Shakespeare’s celebrated plays appear in the collection. The popularity of Classics Illustrated encouraged Seaboard Publishing to issue a competitive brand, Stories by Famous Authors Illustrated (1949-51), which retold three Shakespearean dramas. Although both these enterprises aimed to reinforce a humanist perspective of education based on Western literature, the classic comics belie a Posthuman aesthetic by presenting Shakespearean characters in scenes and postures that recall Golden Age superheroes. By examining the Shakespearean covers of Classic Illustrated and Stories by Famous Authors, this essay explores how Shakespearean characters are reimagined as Superhuman in strength and power.","PeriodicalId":40600,"journal":{"name":"Multicultural Shakespeare-Translation Appropriation and Performance","volume":"136 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77374422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.01
Monika Sosnowska, R. Sawyer
In a world where humanism still sounds grandiloquent, where human exceptionalism functions as a norm in human and non-human relations, where anthropocentrism resides in human cultural DNA, a transformation of the human relationship to nature and its animate and inanimate occupants requires an urgent rethinking of these distinctions. The emergence and flourishing of “new humanities” or “posthumanities,” with its key discipline known as posthumanism—serves as an opportunity to rethink and refashion the concept of the humanist human (intentional, autonomous, conscious and therefore exceptional) as well as to reexaminethe doctrine that “man is the measure of all things.” By the late twentieth century posthumanities has come to embrace a set of research approaches and tendencies related to posthumanism, and humancentrism is the central target. In general, a humanist worldview is based on the assumption that humans are the main protagonists in a drama we call Reality, while everything else plays the role of background actors, then a posthumanist perspective suggests that our world’s stage is capacious enough to house both human and non-human actors, playing roles that are often interchangeable. In fact, humans are “merely players” in a history of the world, being outnumbered both as a species but also as an individual. The nonspeaking and non-singing extras in this production have always constituted the majority of beings/organisms/entities. Such realization allows for a radical extension of dramatis personae in the above mentioned play entitled Reality by adding all non-human personae to the list, since all personae (meaning all organic and nonorganic life) are co-dependent and none is devoid of agential capacities/ possibilities.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.04
S. Lewis
The convergence of textuality and multimedia in the twenty-first century signals a profound shift in early modern scholarship as Shakespeare’s text is no longer separable from the diffuse presence of Shakespeare on film. Such transformative abstractions of Shakespearean linearity materialize throughout the perpetual remediations of Shakespeare on screen, and the theoretical frameworks of posthumanism, I argue, afford us the lens necessary to examine the interplay between film and text. Elaborating on André Bazin’s germinal essay “The Myth of Total Cinema,” which asserts that the original goal of film was to create “a total and complete representation of reality,” this article substantiates the posthuman potentiality of film to affect both humanity and textuality, and the tangible effects of such an encompassing cinema evince themselves across a myriad of Shakespearean appropriations in the twenty-first century (20). I propose that the textual discourses surrounding Shakespeare’s life and works are reconstructed through posthuman interventions in the cinematic representation of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Couched in both film theory and cybernetics, the surfacing of posthuman interventions in Shakespearean appropriation urges the reconsideration of what it means to engage with Shakespeare on film and television. Challenging the notion of a static, new historicist reading of Shakespeare on screen, the introduction of posthumanist theory forces us to recognize the alternative ontologies shaping Shakespearean appropriation. Thus, the filmic representation of Shakespeare, in its mimetic and portentous embodiment, emerges as a tertiary actant alongside humanity and textuality as a form of posthuman collaboration.
21世纪的文本性和多媒体的融合标志着早期现代学术的深刻转变，因为莎士比亚的文本不再与莎士比亚在电影中的分散存在分开。这种对莎士比亚线性的变革性抽象体现在银幕上对莎士比亚的不断修正中，我认为，后人文主义的理论框架为我们提供了审视电影和文本之间相互作用的必要视角。这篇文章详细阐述了安德烈·巴赞(andr Bazin)的萌芽论文《全面电影的神话》(The Myth of Total Cinema)，该论文断言电影的最初目标是创造“对现实的全面和完整的再现”，并证实了电影对人性和文本性都有影响的后人类潜力，这种包罗一切的电影的切实效果在21世纪无数莎士比亚的改编中得到了体现(20)。我建议，通过对莎士比亚及其同时代人的电影表现的后人类干预，重建围绕莎士比亚生活和作品的文本话语。在电影理论和控制论的双重阐释下，对莎士比亚作品改编的后人类干预浮出水面，促使人们重新思考在电影和电视中与莎士比亚互动意味着什么。后人文主义理论的引入挑战了静态的、新历史主义的莎士比亚银幕阅读观念，迫使我们认识到塑造莎士比亚挪用的另类本体论。因此，莎士比亚的电影表现，在其模仿和预示的体现中，作为人类和文本性的第三代理人，作为一种后人类合作的形式出现。
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.12
Joseph M. Campana
Of words and terms, I often think, they are what they do—or what can be done with them. I want to ask, in this brief afterword, not what posthumanism is but what it does, which is also a way of asking, what it does now and what might it do for those who still invoke it. So the point becomes to say, with Robert Sawyer, Monika Sosnowska, and the contributors “we have always been posthuman,” but also then to ask “what can and should we do with that now?” Although most references to origins are dubious (and the unsavory powers associated with them), I start with two early invocations of both postmodernism and the posthuman, fully aware, in the context of this special issue, that it would be no surprise to succumb to the temptation to add “early” before any use of the term modern, modernism, or modernity, or to substitute “early modern” for any of the references to either modernism or postmodernism. This was of course very much on my mind in the years of collaboration with Scott Maisano on the volume Renaissance Posthumanism, which we thought of not as a variety of posthumanism but as an attempt to understand how the stage for later (including recent) disenchantment with and the de-centering of the human was more than capaciously set by the thinkers and the writers at heart of anything one might call Renaissance humanism. In the heady days of 1976, as postmodernism was taking root both as a way of describing the world and as a staple of academic discourse, Ihab Hassan seems to have coined the term “posthumanist” in “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture,” which was first the keynote address at the International Symposium on Postmodern Performance and then later a published text appearing in the Georgia Review. “Prometheus as Performer”
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.02
R. Sawyer, Monika Sosnowska
Karen Raber (later as KR): “Posthuman” refers to a being, object, or other entity that lies outside of definitions of “the human”—that is, it might be something like an amoeba or a dog, both of which are considered less than human; it might be a ghost or god, considered more than human; or it might be a robot or android, whose relationship to what we call “the human” is unresolvably vexed. Posthuman beings can be multiple in ways that contradict our notion of discrete, individuated identities, or they might have no fixed boundaries that allow us to recognize their contours (think of something like the hyperobjects that Timothy Morton names, including global warming, that are so massively distributed that it is impossible to think about them in the usual way). Posthumans are enmeshed with other forms of life (and death) in a web of relations; they cannot be reduced to binaries, but are rather entangled with matter of all kinds. What links these entities is that they present an ontological challenge to concepts of “the human” either by indicating the unstable nature of its ontology, or demonstrating its inadequacy to account for experience, phenomena, or forms of subjectivity. You’ll notice I put “the human” constantly in scare quotes to signal that I’m interrogating the claims that that two-word phrase inevitably smuggles under the radar—that there is such a thing as a human being who is all the things humanism says he is: male, of course; white and Western and probably Christian; autonomous, rational, perfectible, endowed with free will, all of which
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.05
James Tink
Throughout Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a keyword for the combination of philosophical, aesthetic and modern qualities in Shakespearean drama is “grotesque.” This term is also relevant to other influential studies of early-modern drama, notably Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque, as well as Wolfgang Kayser’s psychoanalytic criticism. Yet if this tradition of the Shakespearean grotesque has problematized an idea of the human and of humanist values in literature, can this also be understood in posthuman terms? This paper proposes a reading of Kott’s criticism of the grotesque to suggest where it indicates a potential interrogation of the human and posthuman in Shakespeare, especially at points where the ideas of the grotesque or absurdity indicate other ideas of causation, agency or affect, such as the “grand mechanism” It will then argue for the continuing relevance of Kott’s work by examining a recent work of Shakespearean adaptation as appropriation, the 2016 novel Macbeth, Macbeth by Ewan Fernie and Simon Palfrey which attempts a provocative and transgressive retelling of Macbeth that imagines a ‘sequel’ to the play that emphasises ideas of violence and ethics. The paper argues that this creative intervention should be best understood as a continuation of Kott’s idea of the grotesque in Shakespeare, but from the vantage point of the twenty-first century in which the grotesque can be understood as the modification or even disappearance of the human. Overall, it is intended to show how the reconsideration of the grotesque may elaborate questions of being and subjectivity in our contemporary moment just as Kott’s study reflected his position in the Cold War.
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Pub Date : 2022-03-15DOI: 10.18778/2083-8530.24.10
R. Darcy
The human face, real and imagined, has long figured into various forms of cultural and personal recognition—to include citizenship, in both the modern and the ancient world. But beyond affiliations related to borders and government, the human face has also figured prominently into biometrics that feed posthuman questions and anxieties. For while one requirement of biometrics is concerned with “unicity,” or that which identifies an individual as unique, another requirement is that it identify “universality,” confirming an individual’s membership in the species. Shakespeare’s sonnets grapple with the crisis of encountering a universal beauty in a unique specimen to which Time and Nature nonetheless afford no special privilege. Between fair and dark lies a posthuman lament over the injustice of natural law and the social valorizations arbitrarily marshaled to defend it.
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