History Commons^™

Re-Dress As Redress: Shakespeare’S Comedy Of Errors, Jane Foster Woodruff

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DELNO C. WEST AWARD WINNER

Writing near the end of a century-long ‘explosion’ of Tudor theatre, Shakespeare benefitted from a variety of influences, both sacral and secular. Among his literary influences were the works of classical dramatists (Sophocles, Seneca, Plautus, and the like), who had used their plays to editorialize on contemporary societal issues. To this same end, in his early historical play Richard III Shakespeare chose to address a multiplicity of problematic themes, the most obvious being that, although Richard’s ambition and his lethality had been sufficient to win him a crown, they were insufficient to preserve it: power …

Labouring For The Lost Love, Christine S. Williams

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Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost often is considered a “problem play” because of its emphasis on word-play and its extreme “topicality” to a 16th-century, London audience. Yet imaginative staging reveals that the play actually provides excellent opportunities for connecting with our current millennial students and audience members.

The Role Of Rumor And The Prodigal Son: Shakespeare’S Sources And Fathers And Sons In The Second Henriad, Steven Hrdlicka

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This article challenges traditional, critical interpretations of Shakespeare’s character Prince Hal by examining changes Shakespeare makes to sources he used, in particular the anonymous play Famous Victories of Henry V. Shakespeare does not portray a “prodigal” Prince Hal character as has often been argued by critics, but instead carefully follows Holinshed’s observations that the prince was virtuous in youth and that rumors about the prince’s supposed prodigal behavior were spread by those who were in the service of Henry IV. These rumors were aimed to cause conflict between father and son. Shakespeare’s inclusion of these two important details found in …

“Nothing But Sit, And Sit, And Eat, And Eat”: The Cantankerous Teacher In The Taming Of The Shrew, Eric L. De Barros

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By definition, all comedies must end by praising and/or celebrating the elimination of a serious threat to the patriarchy order, and Shakespeare sets up the final scene of The Taming of the Shrew, one of his earliest comedies, to do just that. In short, by the time we reach Lucentio and Bianca’s wedding banquet, Petruccio has effectively tamed Katherine of her shrewishness. However, despite this scene of and cause for celebration, Petruccio remains oddly dissatisfied, as he responds to Lucentio’s encouragement of the sitting, chatting, and eating appropriate to such a festive occasion with these mood-killing words: “Nothing but …

Shylock And Joachim Gaunse: And A Real Jew, Michael T. Walton

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Joachim Gaunse, a Bohemian metallurgist, was brought to England to help evaluate the resources of the New World. During a visit to Bristol in 1589, he defended his Jewish rejection of Jesus. The reaction of those who heard this real Jew gives some indication of how theater audiences may have responded to Shakespeare’s Shylock.

‘Robes And Furr’D Gowns Hide All’: Edgar’S Role(S) In King Lear, Annette Lucksinger

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Despite his centrality in the play, Edgar’s role in King Lear has rarely attracted sustained analysis. To be sure, scholarly neglect doubtless results from Edgar’s own elusiveness, from the disguises that grant him access to the major characters in the play, disguises that encourage others to read in him what they wish to see. Analyzing what other characters see or fail to see in Edgar’s disguises offers important light on his character and his role in the play. A Lacanian analysis of Lear’s reading of Edgar’s role as Poor Tom shows that Lear’s effort to establish (or to re-establish) his …

Much Ado And Pride And Prejudice: Twin Characters And Parallel Plots, Ace G. Pilkington

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Much Ado About Nothing and Pride and Prejudice are telling a similar story which centers on Beatrice and Benedick in the first case and Darcy and Elizabeth in the second. The article also argues that Jane Austen had Much Ado in mind while writing Pride and Prejudice, but this second proposition is not readily provable (as such borrowings often are) by direct quotation and comparison. Jane Austen’s familiarity with Shakespeare and the similarity of her plot suggest the truth of this second proposition, but more important for this paper are the comparisons between the narratives themselves since they tell important …

A Tale Of Two Shakespeares: Staging Shakespeare At Conservative Christian Colleges, Christine Sustek Williams

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American Theatre publishes an annual list of the top ten plays in production in regional theatres each year and simply removes all Shakespeares from consideration. Otherwise the top ten list would simply be the top ten Bard List. However, when it comes to attempting Shakespeare on the college stage, I argue that many theatre teachers in higher education think twice, or even thrice, before brushing off the old complete works. Most students are quite intimidated when they reach for Shakespeare, having been told for many years that his work is hard to read and harder to understand. Add to that …

Politics And Play: The National Stage And The Player King In Shakespeare’S Henry V And Macbeth, Kristin M.S. Bezio

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This article examines the intersection between theatrical and political discourse in early modern England. It argues that that the dialog surrounding early modern discourses of monarchy intersects specifically with theatrical notions of performance by means of the social contract implicit in English Common Law. The link between the political stage and the theater is perhaps most transparent in the metaphor of the theatrum mundi. Because the theatrum mundi requires the active participation of the audience, they must always be included in the theatrum mundi as participatory citizens in its illusory world. They are drawn into the conversation between stage …

Review Essay: “Will In Overplus” A Review Of Shakespeare Biographies, Stephannie S. Gearhart

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Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

More than enough am I that vex thee still

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 135, ll.1-3

It seems to be a kind of Respect due to the Memory of Excellent Men,

specially of those whom their Wit and Learning have made Famous,

to deliver some Account of themselves, as well as their Works, to Posterity.

For this Reason, how fond do we see some People of discovering any little

Personal Story of the great Men of Antiquity, their Families, the common

Accidents of their Lives, and …

Using John Wilders To Teach Shakespeare’S Second Tetralogy, Edmund M. Taft

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John Wilders. The Lost Garden: A View of Shakespeare’s English and Roman History Plays. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978. 154 pp.

“O thoughts of men accurst!

Past and to come seems best; things present, worst.”

(2 Henry 4.1.3.107-108)

Tracing Shakespeare’S Sea-Change: From The Tempest To The New York Times, Joshua L. Comer

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An historical approach to the changing use of a Shakespearean phase, like “sea- change,” offers a case study in the long-standing power and evolving meaning of Shakespeare’s language. While all sea-changes today are not so major as those of which Ariel sang in The Tempest, the rich language of Ariel’s song has acquired a significant place in the history of American journalism.

Rendering Shakespearean Rhetoric Visible In The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, Katherine Kickel

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Traditionally, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery is considered an important moment in England’s art history narrative. In this essay, I argue that the Boydell collection also reflects a new preference for reading Shakespeare’s plays in the eighteenth century via its editorial illustration of parts of the plays that would not normally be emphasized in theatrical productions.

Romancing The Chronicles: 1 Henry Iv And The Rewriting Of Medieval History, Bradley Greenburg

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This essay explores the ways Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV deploys Welshness as a counterforce to English national stability. I argue that the critical habit of equating the genre of romance with untruthfulness or silliness does not pay close enough attention to what Shakespeare does in his history plays. The Hal he gives us, whose youth and military training in Wales he suppresses, is, generically, a romance character. But, instead of a knight in his father’s service (where his adventures would be securely in the service of the realm), or knight errant, he is an errant haunter of bad company, an …

Enchanted Islands Floating On The Foam Of Perilous Seas, Jean Macintyre

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In localizing The Tempest on “an uninhabited island,” the 1623 Shakespeare Folio associates the setting with the floating island that some masque machines represented. Such machines acted as movable stages to transport masquers from within the set to the spot from which their dances would begin; other masques allege that their immobile sets were also floating islands. Though the stages, permanent or temporary, on which The Tempest was performed were not mobile, they nonetheless were a kind of island surrounded by spectators, on which the magician Prospero, aided by Ariel, writes, casts, and directs a play whose roles are unwittingly …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner: The Presence Of The Past: Shakespeare In South Africa, Natasha Distiller

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In what ways has Shakespeare—as a collection of texts, as cultural capital, as a tool of a colonial education system as powerful as the bible and the gun—manifest in South African culture? Today I will sketch the presence of the past in a way which aims to draw out the South African in Shakespeare as much as the Shakespearean in South Africa. I do this following the post-colonial call to redress the imbalance of knowledges between the West and the Rest, and in order to break a simplistic cultural binary which posits “African,” colonized culture on one side and “European,” …

“Murder Not Then The Fruit Within My Womb”: Shakespeare’S Joan, Foxe’S Guernsey Martyr, And Women Pleading Pregnancy In Early Modern English History And Culture, Carole Levin

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When the character Joan La Pucelle has been captured and is brought before Warwick and York to be condemned at the end of Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI, she at first denies her shepherd father and proclaims both her noble birth and her virginity. She claims that she is issue “from the progeny of kings; virtuous and holy,” and adds proudly, “Joan of Arc hath been a virgin from her tender infancy,/ Chaste and immaculate in very thought” (5.4.38–39, 50–51). These assertions do not, however, impress York and Warwick, who order her to be taken away to her execution. At …

“Sad Stories Of The Death Of Kings”: Lyric And Narrative Release From Confining Spaces In Shakespeare’S Richard Ii, Jennifer C. Vaught

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The relation of Shakespeare's plays to other literary forms like lyric and narrative is a topic that continues to invite speculation. A number of his plays contain songs and sonnets, reported stories and winter’s tales. In this essay I examine lyrics and narratives in Richard II and their dialogic relation to the surrounding text. In a play about a self-enclosed King these utterances tend to occur in enclosures: Richard delivers lyrics while immured at Flint Castle and the dungeon at Pomfret, whereas his Queen laments in an enclosed garden and promises to tell the King’s story during her exile in …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner (1998): "The City's Usuries": Commerce And Cymbeline, Goran V. Stanivukovic

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Scholarship on early modern masculinity and male sexuality has not considered Cymbeline at any great length. Yet Cymbeline is jammed with men embroiled with the difficulties of the quest for national identity, a quest connected with the complications of shaping man's erotic identity. In Cymbeline the construction of masculinity depends upon one man's measuring of himself against another man, for example, Posthumus against Iachimo, Cloten against Posthumus; of one male community against another, of Romans against Britons. It has been a traditional tendency of gender-oriented criticism to interpret male subjectivity in Cymbeline as part of the process of forging British …

Review Essay: Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" In The Theatre. Studies In Theatre History And Culture Series, Lois Potter

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Williams, Gary Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the Theatare. Studies in Theatre History and Culture Series, ed. Thomas Postlewait, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1997. 340 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-877-45592-9.

Review Essay: Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare And The Play Of Language, Frederick Kiefer

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Willbern, David. Poetic Will: Shakespeare and the Play of Language. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1997. xix + 237 pp. $37.50.

"Make Your Proof": Interpretation And Twelfth Night'S Conclusion, Chris Roark

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That it should all depend on there being an indistinguishable twin brother always troubles me when I think about it, though never when I watch the play. Can it be that we enjoy the play so much simply because it is a wish fulfillment so skillfully presented that we do not notice that our hearts are duping our heads?

Review Essay: Marshall, Cynthia. Last Things And Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology, Richard G. Barlow

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Marshall, Cynthia. Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale 1991. xv + 142 pp, appendixes, works cited, index. $24.50.

Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays: Hamlet to The Tempest. Routledge, London 1992. xii + 379 pp, note on the text, notes, author index, index to Shakespeare's works, subject index. $49.50 / $15.95.

The Similar Complementarity Of Othello, Maurice Hunt

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Certainly the argument that the principle of complementarity illuminates Othello is nothing new in Shakespeare studies. Over twenty years ago, Norman Rabkin, using an analogy from modern physics, described Shakespeare's characters and motifs as composing complementary wholes. The following excerpt accurately represents his reading of Othello's character: "He is what he is by virtue of what he is not. And what he is not, what he excludes from himself, rises quickly to the surface in the person of Iago. Whatever formulations we make about it, each reader senses the intimacy of the relationship between these mighty opposites, the degree to …

Review Essay: Andrew Burr And John Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe, Timothy P. Bryson

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Andrew Burr and John Orrell, Rebuilding Shakespeare's Globe, Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1989.

Review Essay: E. A. J. Honigmann, Myriad-Minded Shakespeare: Essays, Chiefly On The Tragedies And Problem Comedies, Paul R. Thomas

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E. A. J. Honigmann, Myriad-Minded Shakespeare: Essays, Chiefly on the Tragedies and Problem Comedies, St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Review Essay: Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare's Italian Settings And Plays, Jay Farness

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Murray J. Levith, Shakespeare's Italian Settings and Plays, St. Martin's Press, 1989.

Review Essay: Douglas Gray, Ed., The Collected Papers Of Nevill Coghill: Shakespearean And Medievalist, Paul R. Thomas

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Douglas Gray, ed., The Collected Papers of Nevill Coghill: Shakespearean and Medievalist, St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Review Essay: Leonard Tennenhouse, Power On Display: The Politics Of Shakespeare's Genres, Peggy Muñoz Simonds

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Leonaard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres, Methuen, 1986.

Review Essay: Derek Cohen, Shakespearean Motives, Peggy Muñoz Simonds

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Derek Cohen, Shakespearean Motives, St. Martin's Press, 1988.