Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183090
Elizabeth Tavares
ABSTRACT Models of early modern English theatre-making rely on fantasies of repetition. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playing companies leveraged a repertory system wherein a set stable of actors performed a different playtext up to six days a week. Such repetitions make available hauntological possibilities that attach to reoccurring bodies, props, costumes, and even architecture. This article considers the repertory of plays that repeated on the stage of the Rose theatre after renovations added a roof over the stage with its attendant pillars, which afforded the Lord Strange’s, Earl of Sussex’s, and Lord Admiral’s players a new spatial, vertical dimension. In a brief post-reno period of highly regular playing, I argue that the pillars came to regularly serve as trees, arbours, and other ecological features to facilitate a character’s death. In The Battle of Alcazar, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and a single comedy, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the pillars make possible an accretion of hauntological resonances attached to their location on the thrust. This article explores the ways in which such dramaturgical repetitions, newly available in the Rose after the 1592 renovations, would have built up returner-audiences’ associations with specific architectural features.
{"title":"‘On Pleasures Past, and Dangers to Ensue’: Site-Specific Violence and the Post-Renovation Rose Repertory","authors":"Elizabeth Tavares","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183090","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Models of early modern English theatre-making rely on fantasies of repetition. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playing companies leveraged a repertory system wherein a set stable of actors performed a different playtext up to six days a week. Such repetitions make available hauntological possibilities that attach to reoccurring bodies, props, costumes, and even architecture. This article considers the repertory of plays that repeated on the stage of the Rose theatre after renovations added a roof over the stage with its attendant pillars, which afforded the Lord Strange’s, Earl of Sussex’s, and Lord Admiral’s players a new spatial, vertical dimension. In a brief post-reno period of highly regular playing, I argue that the pillars came to regularly serve as trees, arbours, and other ecological features to facilitate a character’s death. In The Battle of Alcazar, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus, and a single comedy, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the pillars make possible an accretion of hauntological resonances attached to their location on the thrust. This article explores the ways in which such dramaturgical repetitions, newly available in the Rose after the 1592 renovations, would have built up returner-audiences’ associations with specific architectural features.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"65 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45358491","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183092
Megan Snell
ABSTRACT This essay explores how props that play babies perform not just individual characters but also racial and ethnic identities in two plays by Shakespeare and one by contemporary playwright David Ireland. Working across early modern and modern archives of text and performance to track ongoing, transhistorical processes of race-making, the article argues that the stage baby’s mingling of the symbolic and material puts racial formation on display. Each play locates their baby-prop’s performance of identity at the intersection of race and gender by featuring a paternal figure searching for evidence of a kinship with a newborn. The hypervisibility of Aaron’s son’s race in Titus Andronicus, and its connections to theatre history and material culture in performance and editing choices, contrasts with baby Perdita’s relatively unspecific whiteness in The Winter’s Tale that materialises Leontes’s fears of the baby’s indistinct, potential ‘strangeness’. Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue enacts Leontes’s infanticidal threats and paranoia in the twenty-first century, staging the violent consequences of a grandfather’s obsession with British purity. The repertorial relationships between baby-props across these three plays demonstrate how patriarchal questions of filial descent intertwine with constructions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how studying performance practices helps reveal social processes of identity formation.
{"title":"Performing Babies and the Properties of Race and Ethnicity","authors":"Megan Snell","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183092","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores how props that play babies perform not just individual characters but also racial and ethnic identities in two plays by Shakespeare and one by contemporary playwright David Ireland. Working across early modern and modern archives of text and performance to track ongoing, transhistorical processes of race-making, the article argues that the stage baby’s mingling of the symbolic and material puts racial formation on display. Each play locates their baby-prop’s performance of identity at the intersection of race and gender by featuring a paternal figure searching for evidence of a kinship with a newborn. The hypervisibility of Aaron’s son’s race in Titus Andronicus, and its connections to theatre history and material culture in performance and editing choices, contrasts with baby Perdita’s relatively unspecific whiteness in The Winter’s Tale that materialises Leontes’s fears of the baby’s indistinct, potential ‘strangeness’. Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue enacts Leontes’s infanticidal threats and paranoia in the twenty-first century, staging the violent consequences of a grandfather’s obsession with British purity. The repertorial relationships between baby-props across these three plays demonstrate how patriarchal questions of filial descent intertwine with constructions of race, ethnicity, and nationality, and how studying performance practices helps reveal social processes of identity formation.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"93 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43478841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183089
Emily Macleod
ABSTRACT Edmund Kean played the role of Richard III for almost twenty years, in which time the most enduring images of his performance included his sword. Theatrical legend has it that this sword was passed down through generations of Shakespearean actors and found its resting place in Laurence Olivier’s tomb. The significance of the sword as a theatrical relic can be located in the archival traces of Kean’s performance style, particularly in James H. Hackett’s 1826 annotated copy of Richard III. The sword’s role in the performance takes on even more significance as Kean aged and became more physically debilitated. A performer known for his dynamic physicality, Kean was also recorded as struggling with physical impairments as a child. Moving from a mythical ‘overcoming’ of bodily challenges to simulating disability onstage as Richard to actual physical debility later in life, Kean continued to use his sword to ‘prop’ him up, literally and figuratively, on the stage. The sword becomes a prosthetic object, an addition to the body that shapes its movement and becomes an extension of the body itself. I argue that Kean’s sword throughout his career showed off his prodigious physical skill and then became enmeshed in his bodily decline.
{"title":"The Duke of Gloucester’s Sword: Prosthetic Props in the Repertory of Edmund Kean","authors":"Emily Macleod","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183089","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Edmund Kean played the role of Richard III for almost twenty years, in which time the most enduring images of his performance included his sword. Theatrical legend has it that this sword was passed down through generations of Shakespearean actors and found its resting place in Laurence Olivier’s tomb. The significance of the sword as a theatrical relic can be located in the archival traces of Kean’s performance style, particularly in James H. Hackett’s 1826 annotated copy of Richard III. The sword’s role in the performance takes on even more significance as Kean aged and became more physically debilitated. A performer known for his dynamic physicality, Kean was also recorded as struggling with physical impairments as a child. Moving from a mythical ‘overcoming’ of bodily challenges to simulating disability onstage as Richard to actual physical debility later in life, Kean continued to use his sword to ‘prop’ him up, literally and figuratively, on the stage. The sword becomes a prosthetic object, an addition to the body that shapes its movement and becomes an extension of the body itself. I argue that Kean’s sword throughout his career showed off his prodigious physical skill and then became enmeshed in his bodily decline.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"54 - 64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44305477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183085
Elizabeth Tavares, Emily Macleod, Laurie Johnson
Today, Jonny Glynn (playing Warwick/Rakehell) dug out something from a heap in one corner, and said, ‘Tony, isn’t this yours?’ I went over. It was one of the black crutches I’d used as Richard III. A bit dusty and scuffed, but unmistakably the thing itself. God. If I think of all the time and trouble that went into this object: the discussions about whether it was a very good idea or a very bad one – to play him on crutches – the tests to make them strong and safe enough. To say nothing of my investment in that role, my dreams and fears [...] And here it is now, an old prop in a rehearsal room. A timely reminder as I attempt another of Shakespeare’s great roles: it’s not life or death; it’s just theatre, which is ephemeral.
{"title":"Introduction: Properties of Matter and Performance","authors":"Elizabeth Tavares, Emily Macleod, Laurie Johnson","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183085","url":null,"abstract":"Today, Jonny Glynn (playing Warwick/Rakehell) dug out something from a heap in one corner, and said, ‘Tony, isn’t this yours?’ I went over. It was one of the black crutches I’d used as Richard III. A bit dusty and scuffed, but unmistakably the thing itself. God. If I think of all the time and trouble that went into this object: the discussions about whether it was a very good idea or a very bad one – to play him on crutches – the tests to make them strong and safe enough. To say nothing of my investment in that role, my dreams and fears [...] And here it is now, an old prop in a rehearsal room. A timely reminder as I attempt another of Shakespeare’s great roles: it’s not life or death; it’s just theatre, which is ephemeral.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"1 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42415837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2023.2183087
John Kuhn
ABSTRACT In the seventeenth century, English audiences were dazzled by the display of indigenous artwork in London’s theatres. Red and white feather costumes, constructed by indigenous craftsmen out of scarlet ibis feathers, shone on white actors playing ‘Indian’ priests; audiences marvelled at the novel display of an indigenous-made hammock displayed onstage; and actors playing conquistadors lazed in a grotto littered with other ‘Indian rarities’. This essay attends to one subset of these objects: feather costumes directly made by indigenous artisans or inspired by indigenous designs.
{"title":"Inimitable Rarities?: Feather Costumes, Indigenous Artistic Labour and Early Modern English Theatre History","authors":"John Kuhn","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2023.2183087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2023.2183087","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the seventeenth century, English audiences were dazzled by the display of indigenous artwork in London’s theatres. Red and white feather costumes, constructed by indigenous craftsmen out of scarlet ibis feathers, shone on white actors playing ‘Indian’ priests; audiences marvelled at the novel display of an indigenous-made hammock displayed onstage; and actors playing conquistadors lazed in a grotto littered with other ‘Indian rarities’. This essay attends to one subset of these objects: feather costumes directly made by indigenous artisans or inspired by indigenous designs.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"38 - 53"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43795006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-26DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2022.2159506
Katherine Hipkiss
Max Webster ’ s 2022 production of Henry V for the Donmar Warehouse (and streamed by NT Live) was about power, though this power was not necessarily Henry ’ s. There was the power of Kit Harrington as star player; the power of language and its use as a colonising tool; and the power asserted over bodies (especially women ’ s bodies). The production both challenged and reinforced these power dynamics, and whilst there were fascinating moments that cri-tiqued the political machismo at the centre of this history play, there were also moments that reinforced the star player narrative and embodied the imbalances it was seeking to redress.
{"title":"Review of Shakespeare’s Henry V (Directed by Max Webster for the Donmar Warehouse), Streamed to Cinemas by NT Live, 21 April 2022","authors":"Katherine Hipkiss","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2022.2159506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2022.2159506","url":null,"abstract":"Max Webster ’ s 2022 production of Henry V for the Donmar Warehouse (and streamed by NT Live) was about power, though this power was not necessarily Henry ’ s. There was the power of Kit Harrington as star player; the power of language and its use as a colonising tool; and the power asserted over bodies (especially women ’ s bodies). The production both challenged and reinforced these power dynamics, and whilst there were fascinating moments that cri-tiqued the political machismo at the centre of this history play, there were also moments that reinforced the star player narrative and embodied the imbalances it was seeking to redress.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"414 - 418"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46282955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2022.2145853
L. Hopkins
The Southwark Playhouse was scheduled to move in 2020, but Covid put that on hold and the theatre is still a few doors down from the Salvation Army, making it a pleasingly ironic location for Lazarus Theatre ’ s powerful, pacy production of Doctor Faustus. The story opened quietly enough in a study equipped with three tables, anglepoise lamps, a desk telephone of the kind my parents had and the same lever arch fi les as I used at school, which made the hero feel like a contemporary to me but presumably dated him for younger audience members. I was reminded of the Royal Shakespeare Company ’ s Tamburlaine , where the King of Fez ’ s Tommy Cooper joke amused the over-fi fties but left the rest of the audience stone cold; such nods to the relatively recent past are obviously partly to do with the demographic that can a ff ord to go to the theatre regularly, but I wonder if they also have the e ff ect of making Marlowe seem a fi gure who is old but not that old, someone who feels like part of a history that we can still recognise as within living memory. For me there was a similar sense of deliberate connection to the past when the production opened with a man clad only in underpants walking slowly and deliberately across the stage with a fully-dressed Faustus following at some distance behind like a vignette of human evolution, in a way which glances at the question of whether ‘ stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man ’ (1.1.63) is a testament to Renaissance humanist ambition or an ironic comment on how little Faustus actually achieves.
南华克剧院原计划于2020年搬迁，但新冠肺炎疫情使其暂停，剧院距离救世军仍只有几扇门之遥，这使它成为拉扎勒斯剧院强大而快速的《浮士德医生》制作的一个令人愉快的讽刺地点。故事在一间书房里悄悄地开始了，书房里有三张桌子、垂钓灯、一部我父母用过的那种台式电话，还有我在学校用过的同样的杠杆拱门，这让主人公对我来说就像是一个当代人，但可能是为了更年轻的观众而和他约会的。我想起了皇家莎士比亚剧团（Royal Shakespeare Company）的《坦伯兰》（Tamburlaine），费兹国王（King of Fez）的汤米·库珀（Tommy Cooper）的笑话逗乐了观众，但却让其他观众不寒而栗；这种对相对较近的过去的认可显然在一定程度上与人口结构有关，他们可以定期去剧院，但我想知道他们是否也能让马洛看起来像一个老了但没有那么老的人，一个感觉自己是历史的一部分的人，我们仍然可以在生活记忆中认识到这一点。对我来说，有一种与过去类似的刻意联系的感觉，当这部作品开场时，一个只穿着内裤的男人缓慢而刻意地走过舞台，一个穿着整齐的浮士德在后面一段距离跟着，就像人类进化的小插曲，从某种程度上看，“伸展到人的心灵”（1.1.63）是文艺复兴时期人文主义野心的证明，还是对浮士德实际成就甚微的讽刺性评论。
{"title":"Review of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (Directed by Ricky Dukes for the Lazarus Theatre Company) at the Southwark Playhouse, London, 3 September 2022","authors":"L. Hopkins","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2022.2145853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2022.2145853","url":null,"abstract":"The Southwark Playhouse was scheduled to move in 2020, but Covid put that on hold and the theatre is still a few doors down from the Salvation Army, making it a pleasingly ironic location for Lazarus Theatre ’ s powerful, pacy production of Doctor Faustus. The story opened quietly enough in a study equipped with three tables, anglepoise lamps, a desk telephone of the kind my parents had and the same lever arch fi les as I used at school, which made the hero feel like a contemporary to me but presumably dated him for younger audience members. I was reminded of the Royal Shakespeare Company ’ s Tamburlaine , where the King of Fez ’ s Tommy Cooper joke amused the over-fi fties but left the rest of the audience stone cold; such nods to the relatively recent past are obviously partly to do with the demographic that can a ff ord to go to the theatre regularly, but I wonder if they also have the e ff ect of making Marlowe seem a fi gure who is old but not that old, someone who feels like part of a history that we can still recognise as within living memory. For me there was a similar sense of deliberate connection to the past when the production opened with a man clad only in underpants walking slowly and deliberately across the stage with a fully-dressed Faustus following at some distance behind like a vignette of human evolution, in a way which glances at the question of whether ‘ stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man ’ (1.1.63) is a testament to Renaissance humanist ambition or an ironic comment on how little Faustus actually achieves.","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"387 - 388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44502356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-20DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2022.2150065
Bradley J. Irish
ABSTRACT This close reading utilises new evidence to explore the textual crux of Coriolanus 3.3.94: the Folio prints that Coriolanus ‘enui’d against the people’, but modern editors usually prefer to emend the first word to ‘inveighed’. Drawing on both contemporary textual examples and recent research from the history of emotion, I argue that retaining the Folio’s reading may in fact be the wisest editorial choice.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-08DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2022.2151827
Peter J. Smith
Twomoments typified this production’s overwhelmingly forgiving spirit. In the final sequence, Borachio (Brandon Grace) was brought back on to embrace Margaret (Phoebe Horn) among a smiling and generally canoodling crowd, in spite of the fact that they had, between them, been instrumental in the earlier undoing and humiliation of Hero. But more profoundly (and affectingly), after her faked death and before her second wedding attempt, Hero herself (Ioanna Kimbook) entered stage left while a penitent Claudio (Eben Figueiredo) knelt, stage right, at her ‘grave’. Through her tears, she recited Sonnet 29: ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’. Touchingly, the sonnet acted here as a confession that, in spite of being jilted at the altar and publicly shamed by him, she still loved Claudio and contemplating him made her ‘state, / Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, [sing] hymns at heaven’s gate’ (lines 10–12). It was an important restorative to the uncomfortable idea (probably quite acceptable to the play’s first audiences) that Hero is finally married off to a brute, in order to smooth over the public scandal caused to Leonato’s household. In this production, she was marrying him because she wanted to and, in this, she’d learned Beatrice’s lesson: ‘make another curtsy and say, “Father, as it please me”’ (2.1.49-50). Indeed, what this production did really well was to underline the agency of the play’swomen. Beatrice’s feisty contrarinesswas brilliantly personified byKatherine Parkinson. In order to underline her societal influence, the play’s closing lines about deferring the interrogation of the newly arrested Don John were given to her (in the text Bertram speaks them): ‘Think not on him till tomorrow, I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him’ (5.4.125-6). In the same vein, the change from the text’s Antonio (Leonato’s brother) to Antonia (Leonato’s wife andmother of Hero) upped the stakes and ensured that Antonia’s fierce interjections over her maligned daughter were maternal rather than merely avuncular. In the text Leonato insists, ‘I will be heard’ (5.1.109) and, later in the same scene, his caustic satire is enough to sting Claudio and Don Pedro: ‘I thank you, Princes,
{"title":"Review of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (Directed by Simon Godwin) at the Lyttleton (National Theatre), London, 10 and 30 August 2022","authors":"Peter J. Smith","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2022.2151827","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2022.2151827","url":null,"abstract":"Twomoments typified this production’s overwhelmingly forgiving spirit. In the final sequence, Borachio (Brandon Grace) was brought back on to embrace Margaret (Phoebe Horn) among a smiling and generally canoodling crowd, in spite of the fact that they had, between them, been instrumental in the earlier undoing and humiliation of Hero. But more profoundly (and affectingly), after her faked death and before her second wedding attempt, Hero herself (Ioanna Kimbook) entered stage left while a penitent Claudio (Eben Figueiredo) knelt, stage right, at her ‘grave’. Through her tears, she recited Sonnet 29: ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’. Touchingly, the sonnet acted here as a confession that, in spite of being jilted at the altar and publicly shamed by him, she still loved Claudio and contemplating him made her ‘state, / Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, [sing] hymns at heaven’s gate’ (lines 10–12). It was an important restorative to the uncomfortable idea (probably quite acceptable to the play’s first audiences) that Hero is finally married off to a brute, in order to smooth over the public scandal caused to Leonato’s household. In this production, she was marrying him because she wanted to and, in this, she’d learned Beatrice’s lesson: ‘make another curtsy and say, “Father, as it please me”’ (2.1.49-50). Indeed, what this production did really well was to underline the agency of the play’swomen. Beatrice’s feisty contrarinesswas brilliantly personified byKatherine Parkinson. In order to underline her societal influence, the play’s closing lines about deferring the interrogation of the newly arrested Don John were given to her (in the text Bertram speaks them): ‘Think not on him till tomorrow, I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him’ (5.4.125-6). In the same vein, the change from the text’s Antonio (Leonato’s brother) to Antonia (Leonato’s wife andmother of Hero) upped the stakes and ensured that Antonia’s fierce interjections over her maligned daughter were maternal rather than merely avuncular. In the text Leonato insists, ‘I will be heard’ (5.1.109) and, later in the same scene, his caustic satire is enough to sting Claudio and Don Pedro: ‘I thank you, Princes,","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":"19 1","pages":"398 - 401"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43907968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-06DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2022.2152641
Peter J. Smith
{"title":"Richard III’s Bodies from Medieval England to Modernity: Shakespeare and Disability History","authors":"Peter J. Smith","doi":"10.1080/17450918.2022.2152641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17450918.2022.2152641","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42802,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47341877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"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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