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Kim Gilchrist, Staging Britain’s Past: Pre-Roman Britain in Early Modern Drama (London: Bloomsbury, 2021)
Full text link‘Give no quarter’: Representations of War and Peace in Lope de Vega’s Carlos V en Francia (1604)
Full text linkFrom Miguel de Cervantes to Calderón de la Barca, many Spanish Golden Age plays use war and its counterpart, peace, or that first step towards it, truce. This article explores the treatment of the temporary interruption of hostilities between two antagonistic forces, taking as a yardstick Lope de Vega’s early play, Carlos V en Francia (Charles V in France), written in 1604. Although other plays dramatized Charles’s reign, this play is of some importance as its date of composition corresponds to Philip III’s accession to the Spanish throne in 1598. His reign was characterised by a quest for peace following decades of war between the Spanish Crown and almost every major state of Europe – as well as further afield. Philip II had been at war with the Turks in the Mediterranean; with the English with whom peace was concluded in the summer of 1604; with the French (with whom the occasion for peace arose in 1598 with the Treaty of Vervins and once again in 1610 after Henri IV’s assassination); with the United Provinces where a truce was agreed in 1609 and lasted until 1621. Philip’s father, Charles V, had essentially fought against three foes: the Turks in the Mediterranean, North Africa and Central and Southern Europe, the French in Spain and Italy, and the Protestants in German principalities. These two kings had spent just about all of their adult lives at war
Stage of Exception: Politics and Theater in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
Full text linkExploring a previously neglected mutual avoidance between two key characters in Troilus and Cressida, this essay contributes to the discourse of political theory and the state of exception in Shakespeare studies. Whereas scholars have shown Hamlet and Richard II to challenge Carl Schmitt’s and confirm Giorgio Agamben’s analyses of sovereignty, respectively, on philological and aesthetic grounds, this essay claims that Troilus and Cressida pushes Shakespeare’s critique of sovereignty even further. What's more, the play unfolds a performative critique of power and reveals the ultimate collusion between politics and theatricality
Geoffrey Marsh, Living With Shakespeare: Saint Helen’s Parish, London, 1583-1598. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
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'Tongue-tied, our queen?': The Anatomy of a Pun
Full text linkEditors and critics of early modern drama sometimes note the presence of the queen/quean homonym in their texts, but they do not explore its complex focussing of contemporary anxieties about female power, both sexual and political. Even as facile abuse it can be inadvertently revealing; while in the hands of the period's best dramatists, including Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton, it acquires a forensic force which boosts an examination not only of male constructions of female identity, but of the fragility and insecurities of the male ego itself. Critical neglect of the pun has left its operation unexplored even in major plays, such as Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale
The Comedy of Errors, presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Garden Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, July to September 2021
Full text linkErin Peters and Cynthia Richards, eds., Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (University of Nebraska Press, 2021)
Full text linkDestroying Things on the Early Modern English Stage
Full text linkThe deliberate destruction of props and other theatrical materials was fairly common on the early modern English stage. Characters destroy things in early modern plays for many reasons—to express spite or rage, conceal guilt, hide information, deny power, break promises, make promises, and more. These moments of spectacle were also challenges to the fabric of dramatic artifice, points when the world of the performance seemed to cross into the world of the play. This article surveys these moments and examines how such destruction is presented and how, through several performance conventions, it was used to make dramatic meaning
Playing with Promethean Fire: Dido, Queen of Carthage and Tamburlaine the Great
No full textThis article attempts to consider Marlowe's Promethean imagination in the context of Denis Donoghue's Thieves of Fire (1973). It focuses on two plays Dido, Queen of Carthage and Tamburlaine the Great, but the project extends further to 'Marlowe's Journey', the working title of a book culminating in a new look at Doctor Faustus. The general idea is to link the plays with acting, the inbuilt histrionic style of Marlowe's characterization, with the concept of the Promethean, understood as subversion on the moral and political scales