Discussions of Titus Andronicus have often treated myths as literalizations of metaphor, meaning the staged embodiment of Ovidian myth, despite the fact that a literal meaning is one still in letters. Distinctions between language and physical act or between mind and matter bear both on the aestheticizing and sensationalizing of physical violence and on the metaphor pervading Titus. The speech in Titus that has caused the strongest assertions about the disparity between poetic rhetoric, notably metaphorical symbolism, and the representation of physical violence and human suffering is uttered by Marcus when he unexpectedly sees Lavinia in the near distance, following her rape and mutilation. My essay focuses on this long speech, its rhetorical, poetical, and mythic context, and then its aftermath, the revenge of the Andronici and Lavinia’s death. It notes that Lavinia is conscious, not the dumb object of Marcus’ speech, as commonly assumed, and that her awareness is a game changer. In the aftermath of Marcus’ speech, Lavinia’s reception by Titus and her role in the Andronici’s revenge is again remarkably and mythically crucial. [J.A.]
{"title":"Staging the Literal in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus: Lavinia’s Suffering and Marcus’ Speech","authors":"Judith H. Anderson","doi":"10.1086/715423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715423","url":null,"abstract":"Discussions of Titus Andronicus have often treated myths as literalizations of metaphor, meaning the staged embodiment of Ovidian myth, despite the fact that a literal meaning is one still in letters. Distinctions between language and physical act or between mind and matter bear both on the aestheticizing and sensationalizing of physical violence and on the metaphor pervading Titus. The speech in Titus that has caused the strongest assertions about the disparity between poetic rhetoric, notably metaphorical symbolism, and the representation of physical violence and human suffering is uttered by Marcus when he unexpectedly sees Lavinia in the near distance, following her rape and mutilation. My essay focuses on this long speech, its rhetorical, poetical, and mythic context, and then its aftermath, the revenge of the Andronici and Lavinia’s death. It notes that Lavinia is conscious, not the dumb object of Marcus’ speech, as commonly assumed, and that her awareness is a game changer. In the aftermath of Marcus’ speech, Lavinia’s reception by Titus and her role in the Andronici’s revenge is again remarkably and mythically crucial. [J.A.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"356 - 382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47513524","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}
This essay examines Sir John Davies’ long poem Nosce Teipsum in dialogue with an unpublished contemporary critique by the otherwise unknown Robert Chambers, written in the same verse form. Whereas Davies conveys a thoroughgoing ambivalence about the possibility of self-knowledge, an ambivalence rather obscured by his confident and polished iambic pentameter, Chambers explicitly and repetitively rejects that possibility. But whenever Chambers tries to engage with the details of Davies’ theological tenets—that every soul was created directly and individually by God, that man was made in the image of God, and that the soul exists entirely in every part of the body—he arrives at inarticulate and even nonsensical rival formulas. In other words, Chambers’ poem seems unwittingly to demonstrate his own argument that spiritual self-knowledge is impossible. I read these two poems together as a sort of parable about the potential value to readers of accidental inarticulacy, alongside the deliberate counterfeit sort of inarticulacy that we have long prized. [A.O.R]
{"title":"Known Unknowns: Sir John Davies’ Nosce Teipsum in Conversation","authors":"Anthony Ossa-Richardson","doi":"10.1086/715424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715424","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines Sir John Davies’ long poem Nosce Teipsum in dialogue with an unpublished contemporary critique by the otherwise unknown Robert Chambers, written in the same verse form. Whereas Davies conveys a thoroughgoing ambivalence about the possibility of self-knowledge, an ambivalence rather obscured by his confident and polished iambic pentameter, Chambers explicitly and repetitively rejects that possibility. But whenever Chambers tries to engage with the details of Davies’ theological tenets—that every soul was created directly and individually by God, that man was made in the image of God, and that the soul exists entirely in every part of the body—he arrives at inarticulate and even nonsensical rival formulas. In other words, Chambers’ poem seems unwittingly to demonstrate his own argument that spiritual self-knowledge is impossible. I read these two poems together as a sort of parable about the potential value to readers of accidental inarticulacy, alongside the deliberate counterfeit sort of inarticulacy that we have long prized. [A.O.R]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"383 - 408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46742169","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}
On account of its setting and its emphasis on domesticity, critics traditionally recognize The Merry Wives of Windsor as Shakespeare’s “English comedy.” Building on the work of scholars interested in the play’s non-English elements, however, this essay argues that the cacophonous mixture of foreign words and phrases represents precisely the comedy’s objective. Merry Wives looks different when read in relation to the multiplicity of polyglot dictionaries and phrasebooks circulating in the playwright’s moment, some of which—such as Noël de Berlaimont’s ultra-popular Colloquia et Dictionariolum—drew a link between translation and seduction. Against this book-historical background, the essay examines how Merry Wives’ accented immigrants and crafty women join forces against the lascivious monoglot (and colonizer) Falstaff, whose plans to “translate” Mistress Ford and Mistress Page “out of honesty into English” end up reversing upon him. At the center of these dealings is Mistress Quickly, an immigrant-employed “go-between” whose language can be understood not as “malapropism,” but rather as playful mixings of foreign wines and words. Seen freshly in these terms, this play stands as Shakespeare’s “cosmopolitan comedy.” [A.K.]
由于其背景和对家庭生活的强调，评论家们传统上认为《温莎的快乐妻子》是莎士比亚的“英国喜剧”。然而，本文以对该剧非英语元素感兴趣的学者的作品为基础，认为外国单词和短语的混杂正是喜剧的目的。与剧作家时代流传的多种语言词典和短语手册相比，《快乐的妻子》在阅读时看起来有所不同，其中一些词典——比如诺埃尔·德·贝莱蒙特（Noël de Berlaimont）的超受欢迎的《口语与词典》（Colloquia et Dictionariolum）——将翻译和诱惑联系起来。在这本书的历史背景下，这篇文章探讨了《快乐妻子》中带口音的移民和狡猾的女性是如何联合起来反对好色的花押犯（也是殖民者）法尔斯塔夫的，法尔斯塔夫“出于诚实将”福特女主人和佩奇女主人“翻译成英语”的计划最终在他身上发生了逆转。这些交易的中心是快速情妇，一位受雇于“中间人”的移民，她的语言不能被理解为“恶意传播”，而是外国葡萄酒和单词的有趣混合。从这些方面来看，这部剧是莎士比亚的“世界性喜剧”
{"title":"Windsor’s World of Words: Multilingualism in The Merry Wives of Windsor","authors":"Andrew S. Keener","doi":"10.1086/715425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/715425","url":null,"abstract":"On account of its setting and its emphasis on domesticity, critics traditionally recognize The Merry Wives of Windsor as Shakespeare’s “English comedy.” Building on the work of scholars interested in the play’s non-English elements, however, this essay argues that the cacophonous mixture of foreign words and phrases represents precisely the comedy’s objective. Merry Wives looks different when read in relation to the multiplicity of polyglot dictionaries and phrasebooks circulating in the playwright’s moment, some of which—such as Noël de Berlaimont’s ultra-popular Colloquia et Dictionariolum—drew a link between translation and seduction. Against this book-historical background, the essay examines how Merry Wives’ accented immigrants and crafty women join forces against the lascivious monoglot (and colonizer) Falstaff, whose plans to “translate” Mistress Ford and Mistress Page “out of honesty into English” end up reversing upon him. At the center of these dealings is Mistress Quickly, an immigrant-employed “go-between” whose language can be understood not as “malapropism,” but rather as playful mixings of foreign wines and words. Seen freshly in these terms, this play stands as Shakespeare’s “cosmopolitan comedy.” [A.K.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"409 - 441"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47375691","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}
This essay offers a reassessment of the famous bells in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and suggests that we should read these bells as one kind of dissolvable body among many. Donne builds on the established understanding of bells as subjects, with voices and identities; he joins conversations about their tenacious survival as objects, practices, and sounds in the post-Reformation church. In the 1620s, bells were objects that were always potentially on the point of being melted down and reformed: their bodies, like Donne’s own, were vulnerable to dissolution but could also generatively be re-made. Bells help Donne to develop an artisanal poetics, drawing on sculptural metaphors in which matter is continually melted and re-formed, to model the continuous work that the Devotions demands of its readers. I suggest that we might pay more attention in literary study not only to form and matter but also to the processes of formation—these moments of (re-)making—that act as a middle term between the two. [K.H.]
{"title":"Processes of Reformation in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: Bells, Brass, and the Reader’s Work","authors":"Katherine A. Hunt","doi":"10.1086/713485","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713485","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a reassessment of the famous bells in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and suggests that we should read these bells as one kind of dissolvable body among many. Donne builds on the established understanding of bells as subjects, with voices and identities; he joins conversations about their tenacious survival as objects, practices, and sounds in the post-Reformation church. In the 1620s, bells were objects that were always potentially on the point of being melted down and reformed: their bodies, like Donne’s own, were vulnerable to dissolution but could also generatively be re-made. Bells help Donne to develop an artisanal poetics, drawing on sculptural metaphors in which matter is continually melted and re-formed, to model the continuous work that the Devotions demands of its readers. I suggest that we might pay more attention in literary study not only to form and matter but also to the processes of formation—these moments of (re-)making—that act as a middle term between the two. [K.H.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"217 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713485","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47882530","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}
The central character in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is not the embodiment of mercantile or proto-capitalist values that many readers have taken him for, and in fact repudiates those values. In a real sense, he is not a merchant at all. Barabas is never interested in profit or in money as it is commonly understood; he is spectacularly economically irrational from the first scene to the last. His famous celebration of “infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37) is profoundly hostile to the very idea of money. Barabas defies economic logic, whether mercantile or Marxist, because he does not seek gain. He can best be understood through Georges Bataille’s concept of pure expenditure, the drive toward loss and waste as ends in themselves. Barabas is an enemy to profit, the scourge of Malta’s marketplace. He represents an archaic anti-Semitic fantasy that tropes Jews as economically irrational, and promotes a set of xenophobic nationalist fantasies that reject bargaining or trade. [J.M.]
{"title":"Stranger to Profit: Waste, Loss, and Sacrifice in The Jew of Malta","authors":"J. J. Marino","doi":"10.1086/713486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713486","url":null,"abstract":"The central character in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta is not the embodiment of mercantile or proto-capitalist values that many readers have taken him for, and in fact repudiates those values. In a real sense, he is not a merchant at all. Barabas is never interested in profit or in money as it is commonly understood; he is spectacularly economically irrational from the first scene to the last. His famous celebration of “infinite riches in a little room” (1.1.37) is profoundly hostile to the very idea of money. Barabas defies economic logic, whether mercantile or Marxist, because he does not seek gain. He can best be understood through Georges Bataille’s concept of pure expenditure, the drive toward loss and waste as ends in themselves. Barabas is an enemy to profit, the scourge of Malta’s marketplace. He represents an archaic anti-Semitic fantasy that tropes Jews as economically irrational, and promotes a set of xenophobic nationalist fantasies that reject bargaining or trade. [J.M.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"243 - 269"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713486","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43236979","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}
The study of rhetoric in the English Renaissance has been an important area of investigation since the 1920s. Literary scholars, however, did not fully recover the centrality of eloquence to the literature of the period until the mid-twentieth century. While remaining a locus for discussions of form and content, Renaissance rhetorical theory has also since the late 1970s become central to the study of race and gender, the formation of religious and national identities, and the relationship between literature and early modern colonialism. Charting this history, this bibliographic essay focuses on recent scholarship on the subject, attempting to be reasonably comprehensive with work published after 1971. As this essay shows, rhetorical theory has become increasingly important for contemporary understandings both of reader reception and theories of interpretation. In more recent years, Renaissance rhetorical poetics have become a touchstone for literary scholars wishing to consider the place of the humanities in the twenty-first century. [D.K.]
{"title":"Recent Studies of Rhetorical Poetics","authors":"D. A. Katz","doi":"10.1086/713488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713488","url":null,"abstract":"The study of rhetoric in the English Renaissance has been an important area of investigation since the 1920s. Literary scholars, however, did not fully recover the centrality of eloquence to the literature of the period until the mid-twentieth century. While remaining a locus for discussions of form and content, Renaissance rhetorical theory has also since the late 1970s become central to the study of race and gender, the formation of religious and national identities, and the relationship between literature and early modern colonialism. Charting this history, this bibliographic essay focuses on recent scholarship on the subject, attempting to be reasonably comprehensive with work published after 1971. As this essay shows, rhetorical theory has become increasingly important for contemporary understandings both of reader reception and theories of interpretation. In more recent years, Renaissance rhetorical poetics have become a touchstone for literary scholars wishing to consider the place of the humanities in the twenty-first century. [D.K.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"303 - 330"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713488","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47507794","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}
The history of the English reception of Petrarch’s works is one that has been told without reference to the reign of Queen Mary. This is despite the fact that a history of Marian literary culture cannot be told without reference to Petrarch. Indeed, the English Petrarch had a distinctively Marian phase that manifested itself in three works, two in print and one in manuscript. These are: Tottel’s Miscellany, Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Tryumphes, and William Forrest’s The Seconde Grisilde. All three appearing during Queen Mary’s short reign, and as products of a particular moment, these works point to a specific idea of Marian literary culture that sought to deliver Petrarch from a less worthy Henrician age. Henry VIII’s sexual and political excesses were sharply criticised at this time, and the moralizing and philosophising Petrarch assumed fresh importance as a model for this critique. Petrarch’s example was therefore also central to a broader cultural renaissance that was both Marian and Catholic, and that helped to establish in poetry what the Marian return to Rome established in politics and religion: a rapprochement of cultures. [O.W.]
{"title":"Marian Literary Culture: Petrarch and the Rapprochement of Cultures","authors":"Oliver Wort","doi":"10.1086/713482","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713482","url":null,"abstract":"The history of the English reception of Petrarch’s works is one that has been told without reference to the reign of Queen Mary. This is despite the fact that a history of Marian literary culture cannot be told without reference to Petrarch. Indeed, the English Petrarch had a distinctively Marian phase that manifested itself in three works, two in print and one in manuscript. These are: Tottel’s Miscellany, Henry Parker, Lord Morley’s Tryumphes, and William Forrest’s The Seconde Grisilde. All three appearing during Queen Mary’s short reign, and as products of a particular moment, these works point to a specific idea of Marian literary culture that sought to deliver Petrarch from a less worthy Henrician age. Henry VIII’s sexual and political excesses were sharply criticised at this time, and the moralizing and philosophising Petrarch assumed fresh importance as a model for this critique. Petrarch’s example was therefore also central to a broader cultural renaissance that was both Marian and Catholic, and that helped to establish in poetry what the Marian return to Rome established in politics and religion: a rapprochement of cultures. [O.W.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"153 - 189"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713482","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48145029","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}
For scholars of literature and the law, early modern women’s life writing offers a rich but often overlooked opportunity to explore the lived experience of the law in early modern England. This essay turns to one such example of overlooked life writing: Mary Honywood’s “A Briefe Historicall Narration” (1635). In her tendentious narrative account, Honywood depicts a gentry family torn apart by inheritance disputes. As she describes her family’s infighting, she challenges patrilineal principles within English law by arguing for a more equitable distribution of her father’s estate. As this essay argues, early modern women were deeply involved in estate matters and litigation, regardless of whether or not they appear in the official legal records. Honywood details her many behind-the-scenes actions as well as those of her mother and sister-in-law as they attempted to sway the direction of their family’s land disputes. Thus, early modern life writing like “A Briefe Historicall Narration” is key to understanding the pervasiveness of the law in everyday life and the crucial but extra-legal means by which women attempted to intervene in legal disputes. [E.F.]
{"title":"“The Law of thy Mother”: Contesting Inheritance in Seventeenth-Century England","authors":"Emily S. Fine","doi":"10.1086/713487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713487","url":null,"abstract":"For scholars of literature and the law, early modern women’s life writing offers a rich but often overlooked opportunity to explore the lived experience of the law in early modern England. This essay turns to one such example of overlooked life writing: Mary Honywood’s “A Briefe Historicall Narration” (1635). In her tendentious narrative account, Honywood depicts a gentry family torn apart by inheritance disputes. As she describes her family’s infighting, she challenges patrilineal principles within English law by arguing for a more equitable distribution of her father’s estate. As this essay argues, early modern women were deeply involved in estate matters and litigation, regardless of whether or not they appear in the official legal records. Honywood details her many behind-the-scenes actions as well as those of her mother and sister-in-law as they attempted to sway the direction of their family’s land disputes. Thus, early modern life writing like “A Briefe Historicall Narration” is key to understanding the pervasiveness of the law in everyday life and the crucial but extra-legal means by which women attempted to intervene in legal disputes. [E.F.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"270 - 302"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713487","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49535617","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}
This essay posits that, on the early modern stage, dance was a powerful communicative modality which performed racializing work. Focusing on The Spanish Gypsie (1623), this essay argues that Middleton, Rowley, Ford, and Dekker’s play innovatively deployed around Gypsy characters an animalizing choreographic discourse called “antics.” That discourse, given the early modern understanding and uses of dance, had the ability to downgrade its dancers in the Great Chain of being by kinetic means long before the development in the Enlightenment of the racist taxonomic systems with which we usually associate such downgradings. Ultimately, the essay brings to light the relational logic of early modern theatrical racecraft by tracing the popular extension of that new animalizing choreographic device to another ethnic group in the repertory of The Queen of Bohemia’s Men from 1623 to 1642: Blackamoors—who were similarly entangled in the processes of exclusion from ownership and self-ownership at play in the rhetoric of animalization, both on stage and off stage. [N.N.]
{"title":"“Come Aloft, Jack-little-ape!”: Race and Dance in The Spanish Gypsie","authors":"Noémie Ndiaye","doi":"10.1086/711604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/711604","url":null,"abstract":"This essay posits that, on the early modern stage, dance was a powerful communicative modality which performed racializing work. Focusing on The Spanish Gypsie (1623), this essay argues that Middleton, Rowley, Ford, and Dekker’s play innovatively deployed around Gypsy characters an animalizing choreographic discourse called “antics.” That discourse, given the early modern understanding and uses of dance, had the ability to downgrade its dancers in the Great Chain of being by kinetic means long before the development in the Enlightenment of the racist taxonomic systems with which we usually associate such downgradings. Ultimately, the essay brings to light the relational logic of early modern theatrical racecraft by tracing the popular extension of that new animalizing choreographic device to another ethnic group in the repertory of The Queen of Bohemia’s Men from 1623 to 1642: Blackamoors—who were similarly entangled in the processes of exclusion from ownership and self-ownership at play in the rhetoric of animalization, both on stage and off stage. [N.N.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"121 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/711604","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44478500","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}
This essay revisits Othello’s jealousy to detail the politico-theological significance of this dramatic affect. In the Hebrew Bible, jealousy maintains a covenant between God and a holy nation. When Pauline teaching defines marriage as an index of Christ’s love, this redefinition promises to replace exclusivity with a supposedly universal truth. Yet jealousy persists to reveal a clash between individual realities and corporate truths. Jealousy performs this by underscoring the fictive nature of the identification of a husband with Christ. Before The Winter’s Tale relates the problems of jealousy to a hereditary monarchy, Othello locates them within a republic. The Venetian state sidesteps the effects of tragedy because its perpetuation exists at a remove from marriage. Yet for this reason, it cannot assist Othello in occupying the fictions of Christian marriage. Othello shows us how politico-theological meaning can be communicated artistically, and in a way that thwarts any interpretation that locates real meaning in a forward-looking trajectory of state power. This essay concludes by arguing that Othello helps us to pinpoint the deficiencies in Carl Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet—and, more generally, in the way Schmitt conscribes the power of Shakespearean tragedy for his tendentious view of political history. [E.S.]
{"title":"Othello and the Political Theology of Jealousy","authors":"Eric B. Song","doi":"10.1086/711603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/711603","url":null,"abstract":"This essay revisits Othello’s jealousy to detail the politico-theological significance of this dramatic affect. In the Hebrew Bible, jealousy maintains a covenant between God and a holy nation. When Pauline teaching defines marriage as an index of Christ’s love, this redefinition promises to replace exclusivity with a supposedly universal truth. Yet jealousy persists to reveal a clash between individual realities and corporate truths. Jealousy performs this by underscoring the fictive nature of the identification of a husband with Christ. Before The Winter’s Tale relates the problems of jealousy to a hereditary monarchy, Othello locates them within a republic. The Venetian state sidesteps the effects of tragedy because its perpetuation exists at a remove from marriage. Yet for this reason, it cannot assist Othello in occupying the fictions of Christian marriage. Othello shows us how politico-theological meaning can be communicated artistically, and in a way that thwarts any interpretation that locates real meaning in a forward-looking trajectory of state power. This essay concludes by arguing that Othello helps us to pinpoint the deficiencies in Carl Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet—and, more generally, in the way Schmitt conscribes the power of Shakespearean tragedy for his tendentious view of political history. [E.S.]","PeriodicalId":44199,"journal":{"name":"ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE","volume":"51 1","pages":"96 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/711603","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48035477","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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