María José Álvarez Faedo <mjfaedo@pinon.ccu.uniovi.es>
Universidad de Oviedo
The English Renaissance brought along peace and order after the chaotic Middle Ages, a time which bequeathed the sixteenth century superstitious beliefs in supernatural and mythological creatures such as witches, demons, fairies, elves, ... who could decide on the fate of human kind.
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare, the great Renaissance manipulator of entertainment, introduces Oberon, the king of fairy land (another manipulator of fantasy and reality) who, helped by the playful Puck - who provokes some chaotic misunderstandings - will restore harmonious order in both worlds (that of fantasy and that of reality) at the end of the play.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the way in which three modern 'manipulators'
of the world of 'make-belief' (nowadays also known as film industry) -
i. e. Max Reinhardt, Adrian Noble and Michael Hoffman-
present Shakespeare's sixteenth-century theatrical dream from their twentieth-century
cinematic perspective in an attempt to accomplish the difficult task of
bringing the magic of fantasy back to contemporary audiences, who are not
willing to believe in fairies anymore.
Universidad de Sevilla
The symbolic images of Christian Humanism -emblems,
iconologies and hieroglyphics-
are one of the most important components of the anti-Catholic rhetoric.
Their universal and didactic character provided the pamphleteers with a
wide range of possibilities to transmit moral and political messages to
all kinds of readers (we cannot forget that in the seventeenth century,
emblems were less elaborated and were written in the vernacular) . In this
paper, I will analyse these symbolic images in twelve anti-Catholic and
anti-Spanish tracts of the 1620s, which made use of the multiple, different
and even contradictory interpretations these emblems and iconologies offered.
I will concentrate mainly on the most significant groups, that is, those
related to the animal world, to the Classical mythology and to the Bible.
Nevertheless, I will also make references to other types, so we can get
a general perspective of the variety and extension of these visual metaphors.
Martin Beagles <mbeagles@iuim.upco.es>
Universidad Complutense / Universidad Pontificia Comillas
The paper deals with a previously undetected case of literary borrowing
by the Anglo-Welsh letter-writer and pamphleteer James Howell (1594?-1666),
best known for his Familiar Letters of 1645-55. I have discovered
that Howell lifted quite large chunks of material for his second book (Instructions
for Forreine Travell, 1642) from a text by the obscure and mysterious
Spanish writer, Dr Carlos García, who published his Antipatía
de los franceses y españoles in Paris in 1617. (This was an
influential book in its day, running to several editions in various languages.)
In my paper, I will also consider the biographies of the two men and discuss
the interesting possibility that Howell and García might have met
and known each other in Paris, during Howell's first travels on the Continent.
Robert Bromber <herodotus@justice.com>
A few of the men that John Hawkins stranded in Mexico in 1568 wrote chronicles of their escape or captivity. By and large they penned unremarkable works most of which were featured in Richard Hakluyt's Principals of Navigation. The chronicles are not literary masterpieces by any stretch of the imagination but offer a marvelous opportunity to visit the minds of ordinary Elizabethan seaman.
Besides the inclusions in Hakluyt, two other sources offer up even more unique narratives. Neither story was in the first person: both were oral testimonies. William Collins spoke with officials of the Inquisition regarding the state of religion and other wide-ranging social issues under Elizabeth. Collin's amazing testimony numbers two hundred and fifty pages. The second individual, David Ingram, left a legacy that lives today.
Ingram is still the darling of American historians consumed by the notion of the noble savage. Ingram's quasi travel narrative was delivered before a British Admiralty Commission in 1586 some twenty years after his escape from Mexico. His testimony included descriptions of an ordered society that was technologically and politically superior to that of England. This meaty information, however, is surrounded by beasts as mythical as those conjured up by John Mandeville. It presents those who use his words in support of a utopian Native American culture with a conundrum: was Ingram lying?
By synthesizing the English narratives, whether written or testamentary,
a marvelous picture of an Elizabethan lower-echelon subject appears. Granted,
their language lacks the wit and erudition of their literary contemporaries,
but what they said probably influenced the Elizabethan concept of the New
World, Spain, and the glory of discovery. The fact that some of the recollections
are flawed--whether intentionally or not--sends a powerful message to those
who rely on language to interpret motive or historical truth.
Clara Calvo <ccalvo@um.es>
Universidad de Murcia
The Tercentenary of the deaths of Cervantes and Shakespeare (April 23rd,
1916) was very differently commemorated in Spain and Great Britain. Initially,
both countries made preparations for grand scale celebrations and took
some notice of the foreign bard who, miraculously, had died on the same
date, if not the same day, as its own national bard. Yet, four months before
the festivities were due to take place, in January 1916, Spain cancelled
all the official celebrations due to the Great War, despite being a neutral
nation, whereas Great Britain, deeply involved in the conflict,went ahead
and celebrated its bard throughout the realm. This paper explores some
aspects of the preparations for the Tercentenary in both countries and
the relations with discourses of nationalism, imperialism, race, language,
cultural supremacy and national bards. Amongst otherthings, this paper
will
show that, not surprisingly, the target of the celebrations were Shakespeare
and Cervantes as icons of patriotic enthusiasm, not their literary works.
Berta Cano Echevarría <bertac@fyl.uva.es>
Mª Eugenia Perojo Arronte <eperojo@fyl.uva.es>
Universidad de Valladolid
In his Defence of Poesie, Sidney insists on poetry as a means
of attaining "fruitful knowledge" and thus he underlines its profitable
nature. This seems quite coherent with the spirit of his narrative production,
but reading closely his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, the
same conclusion is not so obvious. The poems are quite controversial as
regards their moral benefit, and moreover the story-line that can be traced
is one of loss and frustration To what extent can these sonnets be read
as a profitable composition? The dialogue that can be established between
the Defence and Astrophil and Stella will lead the argumentation
put forward in this paper.
Jorge Casanova <casanova@uhu.es>
Universidad de Huelva
At the very start of his book Ways of Seeing, the art critic John Berger
says: "Seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place
in the world". This paper will explore ways of being in the world through
different ways of seeing portrayed in the texts of three English Renaissance
poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Mary Wroth. In those texts
in which seeing, though a threat to an order, leads to a positive vision
of the private, there is an unavoidable depiction of the physical and its
transgression, its violation; but when the text presents a condition rather
than a physical space, when seeing rather than as transgression is defined
as an aspiration, then the physical, in dilution, gives pace to more discursive
conceptions of the private.
Hsiang-chun Chu <jesse@mercury.csmc.edu.tw>
General Education Center
Chung Shan Medical and Dental College - Taiwan
Shakespeare presents a fascinating exploration of the manipulation and construction of gender and identity in Twelfth Night. Through a common theatrical practice of disguise in drama, the bard explores the significance of gender and identity in relation to performance, bringing in the performative aspect of gender and identity.
In Twelfth Night, the heroine Viola, after surviving from a shipwreck, disguises as a male page, Cesario, thereby assuming a male appearance. Throughout the play text, Viola-Cesarios identity, especially her/his gender, remains elusive. She/he sexually appeals to both man and woman: Olivia is attracted by "him," and so is Orsino. In disguising as a man, Viola constructs a male semblance through an imitation of the image of her supposedly dead brother Sebastian, a gesture hinting at the cultural construction of ones gender identity, a construction that culminates here in the sumptuary codes and gender performance.
The Elizabethan sumptuary codes set up strict regulations of clothing for people of different social ranks and gender. Violas cross-dressing disguise explicitly illustrates the fashioning of ones identity through clothing. It is a fashioning reflecting socially imposed and regulated construction on ones gender identity. Moreover, the performative aspect of gender intelligibility in Violas disguise as Cesario highlights the volitional construction of ones gender identity on the stage.
The ambiguity of Viola-Cesarios gender and identity is epitomized in the mirror image Orsino has conjured up to reveal his astonishment seeing the identical twins in the recognition scene: "One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons" (5.1.216). The elusiveness of Viola-Cesarios gender identity, partly related to the heroines cross-dressing disguise, and partly connected to the transvestite practice of female roles by boy actors on the stage, helps to illustrate the limit, rigidity, and hegemony, of gender construction based exclusively on a binary framework of feminine vs. masculine, female vs. male, or woman vs. man. The ambiguity inherent in the role of Viola-Cesario challenges the belief in a coherent and stable gender identity. Furthermore, this ambiguity will account for the final transformation and transference of love and make the final resolution of multiple marriages seem acceptable and less arbitrary.
The assumption of clothes has a deeper imprint on ones identity than it might appear, which is reflected in Orsinos insistence on calling Viola Cesario with the male attires still on "her" when Violas real identity has been disclosed. Through Orsinos insistence, it is implied that Violas feminine self will be acknowledged only when she returns to her female costume. The seemingly problematic and arbitrary transference of passion from Cesario to Sebastian on Olivias part also endorses such sumptuary imprint on ones identity. The assumption of her former female clothes returns Viola to a feminine self, but the male part she creates in her disguise would not be dismissed with the disappearance of male clothing. It is conflated by her brother Sebastian. Olivia could substitute her object of love from Cesario to Sebastian because Viola impersonates her brother Sebastian when she disguises as a man. Since Olivia cannot marry Cesario, she could love another "cesario" C Sebastian.
In conclusion, the elusiveness of Viola-Cesarios
gender identity demonstrates the rigidity of traditional gender construction
based on a binary framework. The ambiguity inherent in the character of
Viola-Cesario challenges the belief in a coherent and stable gender identity.
The meaning and nature of sexual identity, therefore, are not fixed, stable,
or permanent, as they seem to be. Moreover, the sense of ambiguity and
split inherent in Violas
disguise does not evaporate with the final revelation of her identity.
On the contrary, the split male part is to be materialized and subsumed
in the character of Sebastian, facilitating Olivias
transference of passion from Cesario to Sebastian.
Jesús Cora <jesus.cora@uah.es>
Universidad de Alcalá
Despite recent Feminist and Gender-oriented interest in Lady Mary Wroths sonnets, her worth as a sonneteer has been misconstrued as traditionally Petrarchan and as an imitator of both Sir Philip and Sir Robert Sidney. However, as I first introduced in a paper read at Seminar 30 "Looking Back at Womens Studies: Writing the Feminine Difference" as part of the 5th International ESSE Conference, Helsinki, 25th-29th August, 2000, Wroths persona (Pamphilia) must be considered not as a traditional Petrarchan speaker that in its female version incorporates a figure of the Patient Griselda type with whom female readers must identify -as it has often been interpreted-, but as a figure from whom women must actually distance in order to be aware of patriarchal impositions and restrictions.
It is my aim to discuss in this paper how actually Wroth shows in two of her sonnets -that Pamphilias self-imposed faithfulness to her philanderer lover - following a self-effacing internalisation of patriarchal values- provokes her sexual repression that finds an outlet in sexual dreams with the result that they become a further source of suffering for Pamphilia and one of the arguments in Wroths implicit denunciation of womens plight in her time.
My discussion will centre on an analysis of the texts from the point
of view of a combination of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as well
as Otto Vaeniuss
emblems (Amorum emblemata, 1608), a text available to Wroth and
which, it is most likely, she used as a source for her imagery dealing
with love, sex and dreams.
David Cruz Acevedo
Universidad de Córdoba
In 1942, C.S.Lewis, one of the most prominent English literary critics,
delivered a lecture in the Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy
entitled "Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem". Lewis, whose lifelong scholarly
dedication had been centered in the study of Medieval and Renaissance poetry,
was not an expert in drama. In this paper I will analyse the style of argumentation
rhat Lewis uses in his reading of Hamlet, and I will try to place his commentary
within Shakesperean criticism. His reading shows many signs of critical
contamination, being deeply influenced by his previous interpretive work
on Sixteenth and Seventeenth century literature, especially allegorical
writing. Allegory normally involves narrative forms and formal closure,
and these two features have little bearing in the reading of a play. Moreover,
Lewis' Christian background and his Humanist frame of mind led him to discoever
a Hamlet full of existential overtones. I shall use an idea from Eliot
("the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret;
we can only criticise it according to standards") and use a wide critical
apparatus, ranging grom Bradley to Harold Bloom or critics connected to
the New Historicism (Greenblatt, Dollimore, Drakakis) in order to unveil
the various misreadings - allegorical, narrative, existentialist, Humanist
- that Lewis performs in his Lecture.
Janet Dawson <janet@cica.es>
Universidad de Sevilla
The rhetorical paraphernalia of The Rape of Lucrece (in particular, images of siege and the forced entry along with the use of colour) as disseminated across parallel cultural sites (those of Rome, Troy, the body of Lucrece, her marriage to Collatinus, and the social network in which that marriage is embedded) become means of indicating the stress points in social systems which have either undergone, or are undergoing change, subject to forces from within and without. The parallel representations converge ultimately as the expression of transition in 1595. A medieval world-order (based on code of honour and the principle of cooperation in which degree (the transparency of thought and deed), is a key mechanism for ensuring that the ideal, immutable and hierarchical universe is regulated and replicated) is in its dying phases and an new order is emerging, whose key parameters are the assumption of risk of loss or gain and of individual rather than collective responsibility. There is also a growing awareness of the decisive role of technology in shaping perception, hence the extended discussion of the painting of Troy in terms of the illusionistic skills and processes of its painter. The Rape of Lucrece is a manifestation, not of two juxtaposed states, past and present, but expresses the uncertainties of change, brought about by tensions (not all of them violent as such) which compete with or contradict the old dynamic and which are still in the process of being reconfigured as a new order. The rape is a metaphor for the processes of rupture of a world view. The rupture, though, is as much from within as without, with Tarquin as the obvious example, but Brutus in the final stanzas being another less obvious example. Thus there are enough hints to ensure that, if the old order was inherently stable and knowable, the new one, will also be inherently unstable.
This paper deals with the processes of rupture. The abundant examples
of conventional rhetorical forms and allusions, whose emblematic fixity
guaranteed correct interpretation, are undermined by variations in viewpoint
and context. The transparency of thought and deed which once guaranteed
universal harmony is, as a result, unattainable, and replaced by illusion.
This leaves a problem for humanism which is now forced to contemplate questions
of being and becoming in partial rather than universally applicable terms.
This general problematic affects and implicates not just Tarquin (the villain
of the piece) but also the knightly Collatinus, the virtuous Lucretius
and even Brutus, who prompts the everlasting banishment of Tarquin, the
heir apparent to the throne.
Elena Dominguez Romero <ederre@ole.com>
Universidad de Huelva
In his well known Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (1959: 215), W.W. Greg explains how by the opening days of the sixteenth century, romance became chivalric in Spain and courtly in France, reaching England in three main streams: the eclogue borrowed by Spenser from Marot, the romance suggested to Sidney by Montemayor, and the drama imitated by Daniel from Tasso and Guarini. But Maybe the most interesting thing about this statement is the fact that he explains that once there, these traditions blended with other influences and native traditions, giving place to a particular dramatic work not to be found in any other European nation. Because following this theory by Greg, Shakespeares As You Like It (1600) turns out to be one of these "particular dramatic works" gathering together a variety of the different pastoral conventions established by authors such as Virgil, Marot or Mantuan, and Sannazaro or Montemayor. Not in vain, the most inmediate source for this play is to be found in Thomas Lodges pastoral romance entitled Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacy (1590), for which Thomas Lodge was not only indebted to Sidney; but also to the ancient pastoral tradition, the Italian Sannazaro, and the Portuguese Jorge de Montemayor. Moreover, the characters of Shakespeares play can be organized by couples into three different groups: the group of the idealized shepherds, that of the courtly characters who are not shepherds but are disguised as such; and finally, the group of those other characters who are neither one thing, nor the other. That is the reason why once these couples of characters turn out to be three couples of lovers, each of them is going to be representative of a particular type of pastoral love. And in this sense, this paper is going to analyze these three types of love relationships with the intention of connecting each of them with one of the three different conventions of pastoral love already considered. In order to achieve this goal, the following works will be considered:
-Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New Directions. Norfolk, Conn.: 1950.
-Grant, Leonard. Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral. University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill: 1965.
-Greg, W.W. Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama. Sidgwick and Jackson Ltd. London: 1906.
-Smith, Hallet. Elizabethan Poetry. Harvard University Press. Cambridge,
Mass.: 1952.
Universitat Jaume I
Little attention has been paid to Renaissance medical texts. However, some recent studies show an increasing interests on different aspects of this type of texts, especially on vocabulary (McConchie, 1997), which experimented a considerable increase.
Richard Banister (1570-1626) was an important ophthalmologist of his
time. His work A treatise of one hundred and thirteene diseases of the
eyes (1622), now preserved in a special collection at the University
of Washington, is a short compilation of texts concerning different matters
related the preservation of the sight. The study of the structure and of
some discursive features of the text may provide interesting grounds for
comparison with texts of the same period.
Jorge Figueroa <jdorrego@uvigo.es>
Universidad de Vigo
The aim of this paper is to analyse the representation of women in English
jest-books of the early seventeenth century. This period of time is particularly
interesting because of the large amount of jest-books that were brought
out then, because the formal controversy about women was at its height,
and because it was the age when more and more English female writers started
to publish. Criticism has generally neglected the study of jest-books,
most likely due to their deficient literary quality and apparent frivolity.
Yet, they are cultural products of unquestionable interest to probe attitudes
and anxieties of the society that has created them. The representation
of women in these texts tends to refledct the misogyny prevailing at the
time, insisting on clichés such as women as lustful, shrewish and
gossiping. Many of these jests are devised to laugh at women who are (ab)used
as sexual objects or the victims of mens
violence. Male and female antimisogynists of the time complained about
this use of humour to degrade women. And, as one of the jests hints, there
were unruly women who could not "endure to bear the yoke".
María F. García-Bermejo Giner <more@gugu.usal.es>
Universidad de Salamanca
Regional dialects and colloquialisms began to be used for characterisation purposes in English literature in the late fourteenth-century. Writers, like John Skelton or John Lydgate, followed in this tradition started by Geoffrey Chaucer and the Master of Wakefield. They selected non-standard or colloquial forms to spice the speeches of low-class characters. These traits were often archaisms taken from other writers rather than a true representation of actual colloquial speech. Regional and non standard features became more frequent in the sixteenth century, in drama, poetry and prose, and especially in jest books.
These collections of short comic stories were so popular that they were
often read to pieces and not many of the early ones have come down to us.
An additional problem is that modern scholarly editions are scarce and
hard to come by. The aim of this paper is a description of the existing
literature on sixteenth century jest books and an analysis of the regional
markers used in them.
Luciano García García <lugarcia@ujaen.es>
Universidad de Jaén
The references to Gypsies, Jews, Blacks, Moors and Indians are not very
conspicuous at first sight in a quick perusal of European literature of
the period stated. The author of this presentation has been collecting
many of these references during a long period of time through his reading
in both national literatures, mainly drama. His contention, after analyzing
a sample of these references, is that they constitute a significant body
of information, in which physical, ideological (with religion as a fundamental
part) and political factors determine a kind of protoracist view of non-white
people. By protoracism the author understands a collection of cliches and
prejudices not fully articulated into a clear sense of white supremacy,
but setting ambiguous preferences for certain features of whiteness, both
physical and ideological, which do not completely prescribe exclusion although
point towards it. The fact that the exclusion is not clearly articulated
allows a certain benign consideration of the "noble savage" already seen
in the the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century, provided
that this "noble savage" is remote enough either in time or space. The
differences in the Spanish and the English views on the issue, as well
as the way in which the more hybrid Mediterranean people were perceived
by the English dramatists, complete the perspective offered here.
M. J. Gomez Lara <mjlara@cica.es>
Elizabeth Is
performances all through the three ceremonies leadig to her Coronation
show her concerns about symbolic images and their potential value as political
instruments. This paper focuses on the pageants erected along Londons
processional route in order to question the queens
appropiation of Marian iconography. This much-debated aspect of Queen Elizabeths
use of her own image is redressed here to argue in favour of a less marked
reference than the Virgin Mary as the source of this symbolic appropiation:
the image of the apocalyptical Woman -a
current humanist vehicle to visualize the concept of female "uniqueness"
-
articulates the design of the arches and scaffolds.It is my contention
that this image is essentially ambiguous since it vehicled a clear, conforting,
message to reformed Londoners but also reached to evoke in the general
audience of the Passage certain feelings towards female figures of the
Royal family traditionally visualized through Marian iconography.
Miguel Ángel González Campos <magcampos@uma.es>
Universidad de Málaga
In the emphatically masculine world of Shakespeares
History Plays, the king Henry VI shows some unequivocally feminine features.
This character is particularly revealing to understand the underlying gender
ideology in the first tetralogy. The aim of this paper is to approach this
"effeminate prince", as he is called in the play, who neglects his duties
as a ruler and as a man, and to discuss the implications of his behaviour
in order to analyse how these plays construct a gender system in which
femininity and masculinity are defined by mutual opposition and in which
power, an element clearly belonging to the male sphere, can have disastrous
consequences when it is exerted by weak non-masculine men.
José Manuel González Fernández de Sevilla <JM.González@ua.es>
Universidad de Alicante
Both Valencia and Shakespeare share an interest and fascination for the sea which becomes a means of self-discovery, authenticity and identity. The Mediterranean is not only a geographical place but also a way of seeing, feeling, and experiencing. It is the Mare Nostrum where distinct cultural practices encountered and negotiated. The Mediterranean attracted Shakespeare´s attention though particular references to it appear only infrequently. The idea of the Mediterranean is omnipresent in Shakespeare giving a new insight and dimension to the plays where the geographical location becomes a substantial component of the dramatic action. Plays like Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Pericles could not be the same without the Mediterranean element.
In those plays it signifies not just a sea but the sea where magic actions, loving illusions, and utopian dreams can occur. The Mediterranean was an ideal projection which was essentially dramatised and imaginatively visualised since the Mediterranean was not the English sea with which Shakespeare and his audience were familiar. Nevertheless it was the sea of paradigm and myth where the human and the divine meet and interact. This metaphysical aspect and cultural dimension is more meaningful and trascendental than its mere physical and spatial reality since it differentiates it from other seas which have not played such a significant part in the origin and development of western thought and culture.
Our contemporary understanding and interpretation of Shakespeare´s
drama can be made richer and deeper by confronting and contrasting it with
similar perceptions and interests in the Mediterranean tradition as it
is the case of Ausiàs March, the Borgias and Juan Luis Vives, three
great representatives of Valencian culture and art.
Keith Gregor <gregork@fcu.um.es>
Universidad de Murcia
The paper will consider the rise and consolidation of Shakespeare as
a character of Spanish drama from his first appearance in Ventura de la
Vegas translation
of Duvals Shakespeare
amoureux in 1831 to his role in El otro William by Jaime Salom,
first produced in 1997. After a brief consideration of the possible reasons
for this peculiar piece of Bardolatry -
Romantic obsessions with the figure of the author, the pervasiveness of
the jealousy question as explored in the immensely popular Othello,
the backlash against Frances
cultural hegemony, etc. - the paper will attempt to situate Saloms
piece in the context of more historicizing approaches to Shakespeares
presence in Spain and elsewhere. The explicit anti-Stratfordianism of El
otro William, spelt out in the authors
preface, will be shown to be a paradoxical reminder of the enduring nature
of that presence, even in works which purport to deny Shakespeares
authorship
of the plays traditionally attributed to him.
Gary Harrington <gmharrington@ssu.edu>
Salisbury State University - USA
As 1 Henry IV opens, the King and his entourage receive reports
of two battles: in the west, Mortimer has been defeated by Glendower; in
the north, Hotspur has been victorious over the Douglas. This virtually
simultaneous victory and defeat both validates and undermines the legitimacy
of Henrys ruling
by Divine Right. Moreover, the manner in which these reports are presented
to the court suggests that Henry, the consummate politician, has orchestrated
the scene. He has Westmoreland tell of Mortimers
defeat, thereby consigning the defeat to an underling; Henry then announces
Hotspurs success,
thus by association attributing this victory to himself. Additionally,
Shakespeare problematizes the episode by implying that in a sense the victory
was a defeat and the defeat a victory. The last thing Henry needs is for
Hotspur, of the contentious and soon to be openly rebellious Percy clan,
to heighten his reputation as a warrior via his victory over the Scots.
Conversely, Mortimer is Henrys
most significant rival for the crown, and his being defeated and captured
by the Welsh both tarnishes his claim to the throne and removes him as
a challenger to Henry for the kingship. Indeed, Henry may have placed the
ineffectual Mortimer in charge of his forces with the hope that Mortimer
would not only be defeated but killed. This constitutes a motif anticipating
the battle at Shrewsbury which concludes the play: Hal gives Falstaff a
charge of foot, perhaps taking more seriously than he pretends Falstaffs
assertion that walking a great distance will be the death of him, and Henry
gives Hal a prominent position in the battle at least arguably with the
hope that Hal will be killed; his position as heir apparent would consequently
descend to his more respected and tractable brother John. In any case,
the conflation of victory and defeat, of the battles
being lost and won, tempers any enthusiasm regarding the Lancastrian victory
at Shrewsbury. This also anticipates the latter part of 2 Henry IV,
in which the reporting of Lancastrian victories over Glendower and Scroop
coincides with, and perhaps metaphorically precipitates, Henry IVs
death. Consequently, Shakespeare implies that in the topsy-turvy world
of Lancastrian rule, battles are not lost or won, but rather
lost and won, every defeat bearing the potential for political gain
and, more importantly, every victory constituting in some sense a defeat.
Sonia Hernández Santano <santano@uhu.es>
Universidad de Huelva
Renaissance rewritings of the Ovidian myths constitute quite an interesting subject for critical studies. Their particularities and deviations from the original versions tellingly speak about their authors' ideology concerning poetry and social organization. Marston's version of the story of Pigmalion's image transforms Ovid's romantic narration into a violently sexual satire against the Platonic conception of love. The female statue becomes a symbol of the conventional Petrarchan beloved and Pigmalion himself embodies the love poet. Hating women's imperfections and fearing love, he models an image of the ideal woman, adapted to his own needs and desires. She is also the Elizabethan prototype of a wife, who utters no words and whose existence is framed by men and according to men's needs. Her beauty's function is that of reasserting the worth of her creator's art.
Physically, her body obeys to the predicaments of Petrarchan blasons and the hardness of her ivory heart aludes to the Petrarchan mistresses' cruelty.
Marston's epyllion ironically deals with the Platonic idea that true
love must be satisfied by the mere beholding of the beloved's image. He
also directs his criticism towards the Petrarchan poets' admiring love
for their own creations, which is a reflection of their Narcissist love.
The sardonic description of Pigmalion's erotic attempts to sexually enjoy
his sculpture endows the myth with a tinge of homoerotism and self-love
that symbolises Petrarchan poetic arrogance.
Derek Hughes <D.W.Hughes@Warwick.ac.uk> / <Der54@aol.com>
University of Warwick
Adapting the Virgilian epic to the Christian expansionism of their era, Renaissance epic poets adapted and simplified Virgils ambivalent reflections on the relationship between empire and the sacrifice of the individual. Whereas human sacrifice in Virgil in inseparable from Aeneas mission, Tasso and his imitators repeatedly oppose Christian imperialism to the practice of human sacrifice, and see such imperialism as culminating in the abolition of cannibalistic sacrifice in the New World. The contrary view?? that European civilization itself embodied forms of sacrificial barbarity appears not only in the well-known condemnations of conquistador atrocities but, in England, in critical accounts of the growing culture of measurement, enumeration, and monetary exchange.
Answering the contention that the East Indies trade did not justify
the sacrifice of lives that it entailed, Dudley Digges responded by citing
Neptunes justification
in the Aeneid of the sacrifice of Palinurusto the cause of empire: "unum
pro multis [dabitur caput]". Not all authors were, however, so complacent.
Particularly in the late seventeenth-century, authors such as Dryden, Otway,
and Aphra Behn came to see the burgeoning trading economy as embodying
systems of exchange which, in reducing the individual to an economic cipher,
recreated the primal exchanges of human sacrifice. In Venice Preservd
(1682), for example, Otway depicts an advanced, seventeenth-century trading
empire, initially regulated by clocks, calendars, documents, and coinage.
As the play proceeds, these are increasingly revealed to be elaborations
of more primitive forms of exchange. A perpetually imminent regression
to pre-social anarchy is staved off by what Otway portrays as the originary
forms of economic transaction: the submissive offering of weapons to potential
foes (daggers change hands far more often than coins) or the offering of
the body in the act of human sacrifice.
Julián Jiménez Heffernan <ff1jihej@lucano.uco.es>
Universidad de Córdoba
Romeo and Juliet stands still as a problematic play within the Shakesperean canon. 20th century readings oscillate between the Neo-humanist appropriation of its tragic pathos and the confused elucidation of its slippery allegorical meaning. This paper purports to show the limits of these two critical gestures. To this end, I will place the hermeneutic centrality of Romeo and Juliet in a "language problem" which has been ostensibly neglected by cricits and which is unremittingly displayed at various levels of the play. First, we see it in the intractable equivocity of the language used by Mercutio and the Nurse.
Second, we feel it in the boldness of the Neoplatonic world that both
lovers explicitly invoke, an infinite realm characterized by the dissolution
of limits and difference, and therefore, by the repression of language
("Doff thy name"). Third, we witness it again in the paradoxical desire
to reinscribe their boundless love in the limited realm of social codes:
legal marriage. Focusing on this "language problem" helps to explain the
connection between seemingly unrelated issues: the rehtorical, the metaphysical
and the political. It also allows us to understand better the true nature
of this tragedy, which is, as García Lorca pointedly denounced in
El Público, the very impossibility of drama. The underlying reason
is that, since true drama longs for infinitude, and since all drama involves
mimesis and language (i.e. difference and limitation), true drama necessarily
performs the expression of its impossiblity.
Olga Jimeno Bulnes <guardia@fyl.uva.es>
This paper aims at providing an introductory approach to the history
of time as it was experienced in modern England. Special attention is drawn
to the role that technical improvements played on the evolution of this
concept as well as to distinctive features of the Restoration calendar
and their relations with the course of historical events and the people´s
attitudes to them. However, it must not be forgotten that only by regarding
Enlgand as sharing her sister Eurpean nations´ cultural milieu can
its peculiarities and its merits be properly assessed. This is even more
so when it comes to studying a period in which knowledge was still common
property to all Europeans.
Paul Kottman, Assistant Professor <kottman@albany.edu>
University at Albany, State University of New York
One of the most peculiar aspects of the banquet scene in Macbeth is that Macbeth is the only one, among those gathered, who sees Banquo's Ghost. He is at once distinguished and isolated by what he sees. What is the connection between Macbeth's isolation through what he alone sees, and the manifest purpose of the scene - namely, Macbeth's attempt to establish his position as sovereign through a public, theatrical display of hospitality? What does Macbeth's visual isolation say about the connection, so prevalent in the late sixteenth-century, between sovereignty, theatricality and spectatorship?
I suggest that Macbeth's alienation from others in the banquet scene
through what he alone sees announces not only the dissolution of Macbeth's
sense of self and of his relation with those gathered but also a consequent
failure of the theatrical model of sovereign presence which held sway in
the Renaissance. I argue that indeed Macbeth presents us with a failure
of the theatrical sovereign, a sovereign that is therefore incompatible
with - and which
puts into question -
the dominant interpretation of theatrical sovereignty in Renaissance scholarship
of the past 25 years. That is, I suggest that Macbeth's failure to share
what he sees with those gathered, and his simultaneous failure to remain
socially and visibly related with his subjects, marks the undoing of the
conventional interpretation of sovereignty in the period -
namely, a model through which the sovereign acquires his or her positions
precisely through a manifestly theatrical, public display, like the banquet
scene. In this way, Macbeth opens the way for the contractual model of
sovereignty that the work of Thomas Hobbes will introduce a generation
later.
Jesús López-Peláez Casellas <jlopez@ujaen.es>
Universidad de Jaén.
'The revival of Shakespearean cinema in the last years makes it necessary
to address certain theoretical and ideological issues traditionally ignored.
It seems useful to provoke discussion of the cultural politics of Shakespearean
film adaptations in order to consider the two major critical lines of thought
and their import to Shakespearean studies. On the one hand, films as inherently
conservative products which inevitably tend to naturalize dominant ideologies
and preclude the plurality of meanings potentially generated by the plays.
On the other, the possibility of viewing films as cultural artifacts offering
new possibilities to liberate those meanings.'
Philip A. Lorenz <pal201@is6.nyu.edu>
New York University
I say, bid come before us Angelo.
What figure of us, think you, he will bear?
For you must know, we have with special soul
Elected him our absence to supply;
Lent him our terror, drest him with our love,
And given his deputation all the organs
Of our own power. What think you of it?
- Measure for Measure (1.1.15-21)
What is re-presenting, if not presenting anew (in the modality of time) or in the place of (in the modality of space)? The prefix re-introduces into the term the value of substitution. Something that was present and is now no longer is now represented.
- Louis Marin. Portrait of the King
In his last comedy, Measure for Measure (1604), Shakespeare explores the theatrical nature of what Derrida calls the "force of law." Specifically, the play asks how does law - and above all, sovereignty - represent itself? The answer is twofold. First, Shakespeare shows that for law to be forceful it requires a body. Second, we see that the representation of law elides the distinction between simulation (like) and actuality (is). Measure thus illustrates a dual process of linguistic and bodily substitution by which sovereign power signifies itself. In the course of this demonstration, Shakespeares play radically questions languages ability to represent law without the aid of a [bodily] supplement. The problematic marriages closing the 'comedy' present a restoration of order which at the same time questions the legitimacy upon which this order rests. Thus Measure both performs and critiques a concept of sovereignty that operates through substitution and supplement.
While much has been written about the theatricality of both Jamess and Elizabeths courts I am particularly interested in the tension between Shakespeares treatment of sovereignty in Measure for Measure, in which the rulers power manifests itself via a kind of body writing - and Lope de Vegas treatment in Fuente Ovejuna(1619), in which the Spanish playwright presents an equally mimetic form of social construction based on the imaginative labor of a collectivebody reading. This opposition between the staging of laws force as bodily inscription on the one hand, and the creation of political community via a reading of the body on the other, mirrors important theoretical differences between Royalist and Catholic formulations of sovereignty as seen, for example, in Jamess polemic with the Jesuit theologian and philosopher, Francisco Suárez. Reading Shakespeares play through the lens of this debate raises questions about representation which challenge current scholarship, largely new historicist, on the nexus of power and poetics in Jacobean theater. Thus in my paper I propose a new theoretical perspective on the relationship between political and aesthetic theory in early modern England which only becomes visible when viewed in the light of its parallel configuration in Spain.
Preliminary bibliography:
Primary texts:
1. Almodovar, Pedro: Kika. Tacones Lejanos. Todo Sobre Mi Madre.
2. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Richard Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987.
3. James I. Political Writings. Johann P. Sommerville, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
4. Pinciano, Alonso López. Philosophía Antigua Poética. (1596). Obras Completas, I. Biblioteca Castro. Madrid. 1998.
5. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie, (1589). London: Richard Field. 1589; reprint, ed. Hilton Landry, Kent, 1970.
6. Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure (1604).
7. Sidney, Sir Philip. Defense of Poetry (1595).
8. Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics; Theological-Political Treatise; Political Treatise.
9. Suárez, Francisco. Selections From Three Works. James Brown Scott, ed. Trans. Gwladys L. Williams, Ammi Brown, and John Waldron. 2 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press London. 1944; Defensa de la fe Católica y Apostolica Contra los Errores del Anglicanismo. 10. Vega, Carpio, Lope Félix de. Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias (1609); Fuente Ovejuna (1619) Decimonovena edición. ed. Rinaldo Froldi. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, S.A., 1998.
Secondary sources:
1. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer-Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Eds. Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
2. Benjamin, Walter. The Origins of German Tragic Drama. London: Verso, 1994. "[Konvolut] N (Re The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress)." Trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth; Philosophy, Aesthetics, History. Ed. Gary Smith. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989. 43-83. "The Critique of Violence." Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott . New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978. 277-300.
3. Bredekamp, Horst, "From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes." Critical Inquiry. Winter 1999. Volume 25, Number 2. 247-266.
4. Cascardi, Anthony J. Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age.University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997.
5. Derrida, Jacques. "Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority." Cardozo Law Review. Vol. 11. July/Aug. 1990. Numbers 5-6. 919-1046.
6. Frey, Hans-Jost. "On Presentation in Benjamin." Walter Benjamin - Theoretical Questions. ed. David S. Ferris, (Stanford UP, 1996), pp. 139-164.
7. Haverkamp, Anselm, Vismann, Cornelia. "Habeas Corpus: The Laws Desire to Have the Body. Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination. Eds. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 223-235. Notes on the Dialectical Image (How Deconstructive Is It?). Diacritics. vol 22. fall-winter 1992. 70-79.
8. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The Kings Two Bodies - A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
9. Lezra, Jacques. Unspeakable Subjects - The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
10. Maravall, José Antonio. La Cultura del barroco (Barcelona: Ariel 1975); The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure; "From the Renaissance to the Baroque" in Literature Among Discourses. 3-40: Teatro Y Literatura En La Sociedad Barroca. Editorial Crítica. Barcelona. 1990.
11. Marin, Louis. Portrait of the King. Trans. Martha M. Houle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
12. Montag & Stolze (eds.). The New Spinoza. Theory Out of Bounds. Vol. 11. eds. Buckley, Hardt, Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
13. Moretti, Franco. "Huge Eclipse: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty." The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. Norman Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1982. 7-40.
14. Negri, Antonio. Savage Anomaly - The Power of Spinozas Metaphysics and Politics. "Reliqua Desideratur: A Conjecture for a Definition of the Concept of Democracy in the Final Spinoza." Labor of Dionysus - A Critique of the State Form. eds. Buckley, Massumi, Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
15. Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political; Political Theology . G. Schwab trans. MIT Press, 1985. pp. 4-15; Roman Catholicism and Political Form. "The Source of the Tragic." ("Die Quelle der Tragik." Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel. Chap. 3. (Düsseldorf and Cologne: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1956), pp. 33-51. Translated by David Pan.
16. Shepard, Sanford. El Pinciano y las teorías literarias del siglo de oro. Madrid: Gredos. S.A., 1970.
17. Sommerville, J.P. Royalists and Patriots - Politics and Ideology in England 1603-1640. Second Editions. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.
18. Walker, R.B.J. Inside/Outside - International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
19. Weber, Samuel. "Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and
Carl Schmitt." Diacritics. Fall-Winter 1992, Volume 22, Numbers
3-4. 5-18.
Maria Salomé Machado <salome.machado@mail.telepac.pt>
Universidade de Lisboa
It is a very interesting feature of the greater part of the satirists in Ben Jonson´s plays, and those in his four major satirical comedies or comical satires as the Poet liked to call them are no exception, that, contrary to what might be expected in characters entrusted with such a meritorious venture, they always partake of some frailty more attuned to the human beings whose untoward behaviour they were trying to amend.
Although it is possible to argue that the dramatist was satirizing his
own satirists, this paper will strive to prove that other reasons may well
be the issue.
María José Mora <sena@cica.es>
Universidad de Sevilla
The paper analyzes the influence of casting on the definition of character
and character relationships on the Restoration stage. Contrasting the original
cast of Drydens
All
for Love (1677) to that of the 1704 revival, it will argue that the
choice of actresses for the main female parts assigns the type of the virtuous
heroine to a different character in each production and thus reveals different
conceptions of the play. In the 1677 performance, the pairing of Elizabeth
Boutell in the role of Cleopatra against the domineering presence of Katherine
Corey (Octavia) turns the adulterous mistress into an innocent heroine
and places her at the moral centre of the play; this choice would inevitably
direct the sympathy of the audience to this character, and seems calculated
to counteract the criticism of the kings
behaviour implicit in Sedleys
recent Antony and Cleopatra. However, the 1704 production, performed
at Whitehall on the occasion of the Queens
birthday, shows a significant shift in the definition of the two female
characters: although Elizabeth Barry as Cleopatra would be expected to
create a character full of passion and pathos, the casting of Anne Bracegirdle
as Octavia is designed to check this effect, and indicates that it is the
forsaken wife who is now identified as the virtuous heroine. This move
modifies the original bias of the play, and brings it in line with the
moral values represented by the court of Queen Anne.
Sofía Muñoz Valdivieso <simunoz@uma.es>
Universidad de Málaga
The present paper analyses the use of film to teach Christopher Marlowes
Doctor
Faustus to undergraduate students who read it as part of a drama survey
course. Doctor Faustus is the first Renaissance play that they read
and thus their first encounter with the language, dramatic conventions
and literary resources of English Renaissance drama. In this context Doctor
Faustus is seen not only as a poetic text but also as a text to be
performed, and one simple way to bring this awareness to students is to
discuss a particular production of the play. Given the impossibility of
seeing an actual theatrical performance, a screen version is indeed a valuable
resource to give the students greater access to the dramatic text. While
there are many available film and television productions of Shakespeares
plays, which may allow us even to compare performance options for particular
lines, scenes or characters, in the case of Doctor Faustus there
is much less visual material that can help in the classroom. The paper
suggests different ways to integrate film into the class discussion of
the play, using mainly the only available film adaptation, Richard Burton
and Nevil Coghill 1967 Doctor Faustus, but also segments from other
films that can be useful to introduce English Renaissance drama to students.
Maria ONeill
<moneill@dal.udl.es>
Universitat de Lleida
John Hart has long been recognised as one of the most accomplished phoneticians of the sixteenth century. The novelty of his spelling reforms has also attracted attention, if not for their rationality, at least as testimony to the changes in pronunciation taking place at the time of writing. However, the discourse in which these are framed and embedded merits as much attention as the linguistic content for the light it sheds on the motivations and objectives of the reform movement. The prologues and epilogues of his work on orthographic reform reveal the social and political weight attached to the issue as well as serving as vehicles for blatant self-promotion. The key to understanding these passages lies in the imagery of disease and war littered throughout.
Firstly, the author postures as a knife-happy physician administering
to the disease- riddled body of English spelling. Secondly, the deplorable
state of the latter is described in terms of war - war among the letters
themselves, and between the reformer and public opinion. Both these images
are imported from the currently popular discourse on the body politic and
are exploited to suggest the urgency, political and social, of wielding
the scalpel and ruthlessly excising diseased members. The tone in which
Hart presents his reforms suggest that his humanistic concerns were overridden
and underpinned by nationalist and political motivations.
Mª Elia Pérez <becaelia@correo.uniovi.es>
Universidad de Oviedo
Most women in Ben Jonsons comedies are defined primarily by their relation of dependence from a man who was either their husband, father, brother or legal guardian. Marital status was very important from a social point of view for women in early modern England. Married women were legally subject to their husbands, but widows were free from this male control and they could lead the life they wanted and have their own property.
This paper studies four widows that appear in four of Ben Jonsons
comedies: Lady Tub from A Tale of a Tub (1631), Dame Purecraft from
Bartholomew
Fair (1614), Dame Pliant from The Alchemist (1610) and Lady
Loadstone from The Magnetic Lady (1632). These four women characters
are going to be studied according not only to their attitude to remarriage
and husband search, which is a feature present in the four of them, but
also to other features such as their relationship with their closer relatives,
with the world around them or the use the author makes of them as instruments
of satire, in order to get a broader view of the situation of women of
the time from the point of view of a male author.
Chair: Juan A. Prieto Pablos (U. Sevilla) <ppablos@cica.es>
Participants: Zenón Luis Martínez (U. Huelva), Pilar Cuder Domínguez (U. Huelva), Rafael Vélez Núñez (U. Cádiz), Sonia Villegas López (U. Huelva).
The role played by women writers in the Restoration has been neglected
in traditional studies in this period. The participants in this round table
will discuss the conditions that have led to this neglect. They will also
argue for the need to revive and reassess the contributions made by women
writers in the fields of science (Margaret Cavendish), history (Mary Pix),
or the visual arts (Anne Killigrew), in conjunction with the contribution
to the literature of their time made by them as well as by other women
writers such as Catherine Trotter or Mary Delarivière Manley.
José Carlos Redondo Olmedilla <jcredond@ual.es>
Jesús Isaías Gómez López <jigomez@ual.es>
Universidad de Almería
The authors of the present study analyse the main elements in two important
utopian works of the English Renaissance, Sir Thomas Mores
Utopia(155-16)
and Francis Bacons
New
Atlantis(1627) and their passage, interpretation and coming to fruition
in Henry David Thoreaus
work Walden(1854). To do so, they not only consider the utopian
nature of the works, whether scientific or Arcadian, but also weigh up
their influence on the American colonial literature. The study links elements
from an age and literature of scientific discoveries with those of an age
of experimental nature and critical spirit. Elements such as the scientific
method, the anarchy, the social organization, the imaginations
fulfilment, the stability or a sublimated state of nature are basic to
the analysis. The study finds its full sense in the fact that utopian imagination
was never content with far-off bliss and perfection. If anything characterized
the utopian imagination it was the insatiable desire to pull heaven down
to earth by a violent effort. Therefore our study relates the potential
of these two authors
utopias of the English Renaissance and what we consider their materialization
through the American writer and his work.
Robert Reeder <rwr2a@virginia.edu>
Charlottesville, Virginia 22903
While most scholarship on boy actors on the early modern stage focuses
on eroticism and gender issues (i.e. the work of Lisa Jardine and Catherine
Belsey), this paper places these performers in another context: Renaissance
interest in precocity. Like the humanist classroom and the Protestant household,
the stage was an arena for precocious performance. This paper considers
prologues and epilogues by Shakespeare, Marston and Jonson in which boy
actors appear to speak for themselves. Critic Robert Weimann explores the
function of Shakespeare's epilogues: they mediate betweeen scripted and
non-scripted reality, brace the audience for the collapse of representation
and influence the play's reception. When prologues/epilogues by Shakespeare
and others involved boy actors, I contend, this interplay between scripted
and non-scripted reality also tapped into a fascination with talented children.
Playwrights sought both to highlight the boys' feats of memory and to hint
at an intelligence beyond the recital of scripted language. After considering
boy performances in prologues and epilogues, the paper turns to moments
within
plays that reflect on such performance: the famous dispute between puppet
and Puritan in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, and Viola's plea on behalf
of the Duke in Twelfth Night. These moments suggest that Jonson
and Shakespeare were interested in a paradox about the boy performances:
the actors participated in mimetic illusion most fully when they portrayed
a version of themselves. When the boys played females or played adults
(if working for the children's companies), their physical difference from
the role may have left the audience aware of their precocious memory. When
they played boy actors in prologues and epilogues, however, their precocious
character was fictionalized, represented mimetically. The playwrights created
a dramatic persona for the boys, a persona which included a witty awareness
of their status as impressive puppets in the play proper. The boys' precocity,
as figured on stage, involved a sophisticated sense of their own limitations.
José María Rodríguez García <josema@lugo.usc.es>
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela - Campus de Lugo
So far little attention has been paid to the key passages in Bacon's
works of imaginative literature in which he furnishes his only practical
illustrations of the use of inductive methods to investigate nature experimentally:
the collection of ancient fable s De Sapientia Veterum (1607), especially
the "Proteus" and "Orpheus" pieces , and the New Atlantis (1623;
pub. 1627). I will be arguing that in all three texts Bacon mixes scientific
with literary methods, and that the stated emancipatory purpose of these
methods (to control nature so as to free human kind from the tyranny of
physical affliction and necessity) is balanced by an unstated repressive
maneuver (to subject the mind of the scientist and of the student generally
so as to prevent their ulterior questioning of those same methods).
José María Rodríguez García <josema@lugo.usc.es>
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela - Campus de Lugo
Wit and Science (c. 1536-46) is an education morality play that
uses the conventional chivalric plot of the young knight's perilous journey
to the castle of his lady. Redford's ideas on education relate to those
of Thomas More and his circle. The dramatis personae of Wit and
Science, like the characters those of many allegorical works of early
modern England, from The Castle of Perseverance to The Faerie
Queene, consist of abstract Christian and humanist virtues endowed
with bodies. In Redford's interlude there is only one round character,
Wit , who is capable of growing from an inexperienced student to a dissolute
youth and on to a self-possessed and responsible suitor. For Wit to be
fashioned into an exemplary Tudor gentleman, his body has to undergo a
series of violent changes, including disfiguration, change of skin pygmentation,
and even physical death, only to be revived (in a so-called renouveau)
by the personified virtues who come to his rescue. In my essay I compare
the doctrines advanced by the plot of Wit and Science with relevant
ancient Greek and Italian humanist ideas on school discipline and with
the grammar-school reforms that took place in England during Henry VIII's
rule. I also sketch out a psychonalytical reading of select episodes in
Wit's progress that lend themselves to Freudian and Lacanian treatments,
e.g., the moments in which the protagonists lays and beheads the giant
Tediousness and in which he beholds, Dorian Gray-like , his grotesque reflection
in a mirror.
Paula M0 Rodríguez
Gómez <rodgomez@fyl.uva.es>
Universidad de Valladolid
This paper was inspired by Jean Markale's suggestion that the portrayal of a battle of trees in Macbeth might have been inspired by the Welsh text of Câd Goddeu. Attributed to Taliesin, the bard and belonging to the Welsh Book of Taliesin, collected in the 14th century, Câd Goddeu displays a battle fought by two separate sets of mythological forces taking the form of trees. Robert Graves' reconstruction of the text rendered it available for modern readers through a decodification of the alphabet Beth-Louis-Niomh based on the choreography of the trees which provides an aid to understand its significance. This paper purports an attempt to further pursue that discussion by analysing some of the features contained in the Welsh piece, such as the importance of the hidden name, the battle between Good and Evil or the Ceres myth. According to this, we will view those features as a means Shakespeare uses in order to flatter king James, sponsoring Macbeth production, both as the legitimate heir to the English throne and as a monarch beneficious to his kingdom. The projection of the mythological battle outcome on Macbeth, will cause us to reach valid conclusions concerning the allegorical interpretation of Shakespeare's play.
SHORT REFERENCE LIST.
Gantz, Jeffrey (ed.) Mabinogion. London: Penguin Books, 1976
Evans, Gwenogvryn. Facsimile and text of the Book of Taliesin. Cardiff: Llanbedrog Publisher, 1910.
Graves, Robert. La Diosa Blanca 1. Madrid: Alianza, 1984.
Graves, Robert. La Diosa Blanca 2. Madrid: Alianza, 1983.
Jakobs, Joseph. Celtic fairy Tales. London: the Guernsey Press, 1995.
Markale, Jean. Los Celtas y la Civilización Celta. Madrid:
Taurus Ediciones, 1992
Concha Sastre Colino <csastre@fing.uva.es>
Universidad de Valladolid
Passions, folly and wild forces make up the plot of this play. King
Lear is the centre of an antithetic universe. The conflict between: the
tragic and the comic, good sense and derangement, wild nature and civilization,
love and hatred, sentimentality and cruelty, reality and idealism, comprises
the complex structure of the play, which will trigger a wave of fatal events.
In the overview that the Shakespearean tragedy shows, we can watch the
different characters bring about either their own destruction or their
own expiatory liberation.
Adelaida Serras <aserras@mail.telepac.pt>
Universidade de Lisboa
Thomas Mores famous work Utopia has justly been the object of a voluminous amount of scholarly work insofar it started an original fashion of literary and cultural form. In spite of the distinct interpretations, which have come to light throughout the years, the wish to present a bettered world in exercise stands out as a major goal of his work. The dream to convert his England into a more productive society using the current knowledge and manufacturing processes, and in so doing, to construct a more egalitarian commonwealth highlight as tangible objectives for Mores progressive project.
However, in terms of gender, Utopias harmonic worldvision is denied, the humanist view that prevails in his dream world being a patriarchal one. There, men are granted better chances of living according to their own merits and efforts, both as individuals and citizens, their roles in the public sphere no longer depending on chancy birth rights and privilege. Notwithstanding this new political structure, women seem to linger on mens shadow, deprived of an autonomous contribution in public affairs. They remain males subordinated, their traditional functions and duties keeping them off from growing into adult and complete human beings some women were about to claim.
Thus, in our contemporary view, the discrepancy between male and female
spheres in Mores proposal, inasmuch as it produces a draw back effect
in a commonwealth to-be, may introduce a distopian element in his eutopia,
which contradicts the pursuit of happiness purpose for everyone.
Graham Shorrocks <gshorroc@mun.ca>
Universidad de Salamanca - Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
In my 2000 SEDERI paper, "Dialects of Early Modern English and Their
Study," I outlined the available sources for the dialectology of Early
Modern English, noting in particular the relatively small amount of dialectological
work that had been done before the late C18. I suggested, nevertheless,
that C19 dialectology and dialect literature had not simply sprung up out
of the blue, as accounts often stated or implied, but that the beginnings
of both English dialectology and English dialect literature might be found
in the period C16-C18. The motivations of the antiquarians of the Early
Modern period had probably not been well understood, it was argued, and
the antiquarian work potentially relevant to English dialectology had been
underestimated in terms of both quantity and significance. In addition,
manuscripts and printed documents (other than belles lettres) of
dialectological import existed in greater quantities than many linguists
had supposed. In the present paper, I should like to illustrate some of
these generalisations by analysing a dialect text, or antiquarian specimen,
more closely. The text chosen is perhaps the most famous, and probably
also the most misunderstood, of the antiquarian specimens, viz. John Collier's
A View of the Lancashire Dialect, which was first published in 1746
under the pseudonym of Tim Bobbin. Given that Collier had collected dialect
materials for many years before he wrote the dialogue, and given further
that society was still relatively static at the time, and Collier's materials
rather conservative when he collected them, it is not unreasonable to imagine
that this text offers us some insights into the Lancashire dialects (not
dialect!) of the C17. By dialectological standards, this is comfortably
Early Modern. That having been said, the text is a difficult one in
many way. It does not represent a homogeneous dialect, and its author's
intentions were probably multifarious. I shall argue that it has often
been misunderstood. (Specimens will be provided for analysis.)
John Stone <stone@fil.ub.es>
Universidad de Barcelona
Despite the growing number and popularity of studies of law as an early modern English literary theme (White, Tucker, Shupack, Kornstein, Dolan) and of law and literature as parallel linguistic systems imposing artificial order by means of fictions (Aristodemou, Posner, Polloczek) and informing each others constructs of selfhood (Hutson, Wilson, Kahn), one of the most notorious of English renaissance "legal plays", the Latin farcical comedy Ignoramus by George Ruggle, has attracted scant critical attention in the last twenty years. Performed twice before James I at Cambridge in 1615 and translated into English three times during the reign of Charles II, Ignoramus is chiefly remembered as a veiled attack on the chief justice of the Court of Kings Bench, Sir Edward Coke, and as evidence of Jamess worsening political relations with the London barristers. Yet in presenting its lawyerly vice figure as cunning in the drafting and defence of contracts, and as applying such legal formulae as quid pro quo to purely sentimental questions, the play also highlights early modern insecurities about the limits of the new ways of making bargains. In this paper, Ill focus on conflicting contractual obligations in the first English version of the text, Ferdinando Parkhursts Ignoramus, the Academical-Lawyer (1662); in addition to analysing the limits and logic of contract in Ignoramus, Ill attempt to address the question of whether the plays legal outcome - Ignoramus is trumped by a pre-existing pre-marital contract - was in fact valid at common law in the seventeenth century.
Bibliography
Aristodemou, Maria. Law and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Dolan, Frances E., ed. Renaissance Drama and the Law. Renaissance Drama: New Series XXV. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1996.
Huston, Lorna. "Who Speaks for Justice?: Renaissance Legal Development and the Literary Voices of Women". Sederi 8 (1998): 113-36.
Kahn, Paul. Law & Love: The Trials of King Lear. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
Kornstein, Daniel. Kill All the Lawyers? Shakespeares Legal Appeal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.
Polloczek, Deiter Paul. Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Sterne to Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Posner, Richard. Law and Literature. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998.
Shupack, Paul. "Natural Justice and King Lear." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 9.1: 67-105.
Tucker, E. F. J.,ed. A Critical Edition of Ferdinando Parkhursts Ignoramus, the Academical Lawyer. The Renaissance Imagination 30. New York: Harland, 1980.
--. Intruder into Eden: Representations of the Common Lawyer in English Literature 1350-1750. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984.
White, R. S. Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Wilson, Luke. Theaters of Intention: Drama and the Law in Early Modern
England. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
Cinta Zunino Garrido <cintazunino@hotmail.com>
Universidad de Huelva
Rhetoric was an essential discipline in the Renaissance to fully understand plays such as Thomas Kyds The Spanish Tragedy. Paying special attention to the figurative devices present in the play, this paper intends to be a new contribution to the study of this rhetorical language in Kyds tragedy. I will mainly focus my study on the descriptions of battles that appear in the first act of the play, and on how these descriptions seem to be tightly connected to the Humanist rhetorical tradition revised by Erasmus in his De Copia. When describing the terms enargeia and evidentia, Erasmus is constantly concerned with the relationship between words and things, emphasising in that way the importance of truth-telling as expressed by means of an accurate rhetorical language. Rhetorical accuracy, words and things are therefore bound and interconnected, which renders language a vital tool for communicating faithful information. Following this leading idea offered by Erasmus, this paper seeks to provide a new perspective of how the language and richness in discourse used to describe the battle in The Spanish Tragedy are related to Erasmus interest in shaping the thoughts with a trustworthy and accurate rhetoric.