Shakespeare's Lawsuits

This nytimes article details the various people who have weighed in on the identity of whoever wrote Shakespeare's plays--have you, for instance, ever heard of the Supreme Court case Earl of Oxford vs. William Shakespeare?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E7DF1F3DF933A25751C0A9649C8B63&scp=3&sq=shakespeare&st=cse

Incredible.

Restoration Literary Criticism

Below are two links to 1660s literary criticism by John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell. We've talked a bit about Dryden already, but Shadwell is probably new to you. A Restoration playwright and critic, he likely had a hand in revising Dryden and Davenant's revision of Shakespeare's The Tempest, adding songs to make the play even more musical. (The version you skimmed for class two weeks ago is the pre-Shadwell text.)

The text linked to here is the preface to Shadwell's The Sullen Lovers (1668). Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1667) is structured as a lengthy conversation between friends. As they discuss the merits of English drama and of the previous generation's playwrights (mainly Jonson, Shakespeare, and Fletcher), they also reveal some of the same preoccupations with the French and with Frenchness that we mentioned last week.

Skim through both as time permits. Be sure, though, to read Dryden's discussion of Epicoene, which he refers to throughout as The Silent Woman . Shadwell's preface, available through Google Books, is included in Restoration Literature: An Anthology, ed. Paul Hammond (NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 196-200.

The gentleman pictured above is John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, whom we'll be discussing in class on Thursday. Painted by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1677, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Misogyny Galore

Reading the Restoration Tempest, I've found that the co-editors of Shakespeare's piece not only deigned to add several characters/love interests, but also added a great deal of misogyny to the play's lines.

For instance:
"like most of her frail Sex,
She's false, but has not learned the art to hide it;
Nature has done her part, she loves variety:
Why did I think that any Woman could
Be innocent, because she's young? no, no,
Their Nurses teach them Change, when with two Nipples
They divide their liking."

This is Ferdinand on Miranda, Act 4, Scene 1, starting at about line 80.

It's also interesting to read this play and see what the co-editors' ideas of what a man who had never seen a woman, versus the woman(en) who had never seen a man, would be like. Hippolito's youth seems to make him naively overeager to claim women for himself, so much so that he makes a rival for Miranda in Ferdinand...

Woe, that I am King!*

Miranda brought the importance of bloodlines and class structure in The Tempest today in class, and I thought it was interesting that, going off the conversations of Prospero's power over others in the play, part of his ability to match Miranda and Ferdinand together is based on the absence of the king. There's something like a power vacuum because Prospero removes power from those who would normally be in power, and Shakespeare has Ferdinand often lamenting over the "death" of his father, the king, while emphasizing that his father is the king.

*just paraphrasing. :)

The Reuengers Tragaedie: a side note

In my quest for a copy for the Revenger's Tragedy, I managed to find only the oldest copy owned by the Amherst College library system deep down in the lowest floor of the library. It was published in 1878 and has stiff, yellowed pages that were apparently last perused in the 70s.

Reading it is more entertaining than even Middleton might have anticipated, because I have to sound out all the words in order to understand what they're saying. For instance:

"Within the spend-thrift veynes of a drye Duke, A parcht and juicelesse luxur. O God! One that has scarce bloud inough to liue upon--and hee to ryot it like a sonne and heyre?"

Oh, the boon to the English-speaking world that is standardized English!

Cheapside during Lent

TOUCHWOOD SENIOR
What shift she'll make now with this piece of flesh
In this strict time of Lent, I cannot imagine;
Flesh dare not peep abroad now; I have known
This city now above this seven years,
But I protest in better state of government
I never knew it yet, nor ever heard of;
There has been more religious wholesome laws
In the half circle of a year erected
For common good, than memory ever knew of,
Enter Sir Oliver Kix and his Lady.
Setting apart corruption of promoters,
And other poisonous officers that infect
And with a venomous breath taint every goodness.

In trying to figure out what the promoters were doing in Middleton's play, I found this speech by Touchstone Sr. in the scene before they appear. He's sincerely worried about the fate of the woman he's impregnated and just paid off, because, as he informs us for the first time, this is the "strict time of Lent." The eating of flesh is forbidden - as is whoring and babies out of wedlock. It's a time when all kinds of excess is supposed to be curbed, and according to Touchstone, it is. But his paean to London's "better state of governance" is completely out of touch with everything we've seen int he play.

Of course, this speech - particularly praising London's growing number of laws - sounds more than a little cheeky. Touchstone may be sincere, but Middleton is certainly not; when Touchstone declares his city "religious" and "wholesome," I can't possibly take him seriously. His praise of innumerate new religious laws is a particularly fun way of tweaking them - they don't seem to have had much effect in Cheapside. And of course, when the promoters themselves arrive, we see what seems to be the whole effect of attempts (presumably Puritan) to legislate virtue: people continue to eat meat, but now the promoters occasionally have an excuse to steal it or to obtain bribes.

If Middleton's Cheapside setting is critical for this play, the timing seems just as carefully chosen: what could highlight the hypocrisy of all this eating, drinking, and whoring more than setting the play at Lent? The downfall of the promoters, smack in the middle of the play, is one of the most satisfying scenes for me: a set-piece that could have gone almost anywhere, it has (1) hypocrites, (2) clever antagonists, and (3) the hypocrites getting their comeuppance. What makes the scene a little more complicated than that, though, is exactly who those clever heroes are. Allwit, triumphing over the promoters, is no more virtuous than they are - but at least, it seems, he's no hypocrite.

Possible Research Topic

I know this is (very much) a side thought, but I was fascinated by what someone brought up in class today about Shakesperean/Middletonian ideas about what we today would consider homosexuality. I hadn't before considered the possibility that homosexuality as an identity hasn't always been a widely-accept social norm for ages, and it might be interesting to explore how that's represented in the literature that we read. (Or not, since it's so straightforward.)

On another note, it's also always startling to me that the comedies we read don't consider the keeping of an ingle to be child abuse - was there no conception of consent on the part of women, children, or people of a lower class?

Goldsmiths

The original Goldsmiths' Company Hall -- where, we are told at the end of the play, Touchstone Junior and Moll Yellowhammer's wedding dinner will eventually take place -- is no longer standing. The same holds for the building that replaced it, which was torn down in the nineteenth century. But the Goldsmiths' Company still exists. Its website offers useful information on the Company's history here. Poke around a bit on the site if you have time; we'll talk more about the livery companies in class tomorrow.

Cheapside

Here is a link to the interactive map of early modern London that we consulted in class last week.

A brief but helpful account of the history of Cheapside, as well as a description of its socio-economic make-up, can be found through the same site here.

Hearing: Something to See

To the left are two very different seventeenth-century images of listening. The first, Peter Paul Reubens's Hercules and Omphale, was painted in 1606 and hangs in the Louvre in Paris. The second, by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, is entitled Portrait of the Mennonite Preacher Cornelius Anslo and His Wife, Aeltje Schouten, and is dated 1641 (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin). Professor Andaleeb Banta in Amherst's Art History Department shared the Rembrandt image with us; take a look at the preacher's wife's headdress, which is shaped like a second ear.

We might want to think about the gendering of hearing in these images, as well as about the intentional vs. unwilling absorption of sound -- all interesting topics in light of Epicoene, certainly, but also in connection with Chaste Maid.