Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Fun With Palamon And Arcite: Rationale And Strategies For Teaching The Two Noble Kinsmen As The Culmination Of The Shakespearean Canon, Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

Hardly noticed in the reception of Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human several years ago was his hint that not The Tempest but The Two Noble Kinsmen makes an appropriate final accomplishment. On one level, the play is merely a stage adaptation of Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, with a rather crude couple of subplots thrown in, perhaps to please the commoners. In an undergraduate forum, I am less inclined to evaluate Fletcher's contribution as distinct from Shakespeare, but I do think the play important for how it is representative of many of the co-authored English Renaissance plays …

What Happens (And Doesn't) In Hamlet (And Who Cares?), Joanne E. Gates

Presentations, Proceedings & Performances

This lecture, sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, uses the classic text by John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet, to initiate some important considerations on appreciating and teaching Hamlet. Attached as addenda 3 is a Handout which includes the list of soliloquies, keyed to act, scene, lines, as recorded in both the Riverside 2^nd edition and Norton 3^rd edition texts.

Wilson often gravitates to conundrums of the text. Is Hamlet fearing his own mental instability when he warns Marcellus and Horatio that he may put an "antic disposition" on? Why does Shakespeare give us two versions …

Complete Bosoms, Incomplete Men: Reading Abstinence In Measure For Measure, Joseph Makuc

English Summer Fellows

Measure for Measure has often been called one of Shakespeare’s problem plays, and as recent productions show, Measure’s problems — including sexual coercion and governmental corruption — resonate with readers and audiences today. Recent scholarship has examined sexual abstinence in Measure for Measure in terms of its historical economic and religious context, arguing that protagonist Isabella represents a radical break from merchant economics by opting out of the sexual economy. However, Angelo and the Duke, the play's other central characters, also make claims about the values of abstinence, and those claims are at odds with Isabella's claims. My research will …

The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Daniel Gordon

Winthrop Faculty and Staff Publications

The Merry Wives of Windsor A story of LUST, GREED, and DIRTY LAUNDRY
By William Shakespeare, adapted by Daniel Gordon.

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor uses more prose than any of his other plays, for indeed, these characters are simple folk. His setting of the countryside of Windsor also offers clues to how I might interpret this play for a South Carolina audience. To reinforce the tight-knit community or provincial common folk that is wary of outsiders, I set this production in a southern trailer park. The script and rhythms fit remarkably well with a southern twang. Knowing the …

Shakespeare In The Nineteenth Century; Shakespeare, Time And The Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner reviews Shakespeare in the Nineteenth Century (edited by Gail Marshall) and Shakespeare, Time and the Victorians: A Pictorial Exploration (by Stuart Sillars) for Victorian Studies.

Relation And Responsibility: A Levinasian Reading Of King Lear, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas about intersubjectivity can change our reading of Shakespeare by putting philosophical pressure on Shakespeare’s dramatization of human relatedness in The Tragedy of King Lear (1607–8). Even though Levinas does not discuss Lear at length in any of his published work, this difficult philosopher and this difficult play have much to say to one another. Levinas can be fruitfully brought to bear on Shakespeare’s great tragedy, generating fresh and productive ideas about its most pivotal moments, its most perplexing questions, and its most popular interpretations. In addition, Levinas can provide a useful frame for discussing the nature of …

Summer Of Shrew, Part 4: Which End’S Up?, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In the last of a four-part series on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner explores how expanding the range of the titular Shrew to include male characters is actually a return to its original meaning. Pollack-Pelzner focuses on a long-forgotten Renaissance sequel to Shrew (John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed) that takes the taming of men even further and turns its gender roles upside down.

Summer Of Shrew, Part 3: A Sly Conceit, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

In the third of a four-part series on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner asks, what if Kate’s story isn’t the play’s only reality? Pollack-Pelzner explores how a drunken beggar and an earlier version of the script shift the brawling balances of the play and call into question who the real shrew is.

Renaissance Drama And Magic: Humanism And Hermeticism In Early Modern England, Caitlin A. Larracey

Honors Program Theses and Projects

With deals made with the devil, the promise of base metals turned into gold, and charms cast over beasts, humans, and spirits, magic has a profound role in the drama of Early Modern England. Even more than magic, be it black or white, the magus repeatedly takes center stage in front of Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. There exists a fascination in the period with unnatural or supernatural powers, especially in light of the reputations of figures such as the physician-magicians John Dee and Simon Forman, and even King James I. Yet the magic and magician that emerge in principal plays …

Acting, Integrity, And Gender In Coriolanus, Kent Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

Shakespeare's Coriolanus... anticipates and corroborates modern-day analyses emphasizing the sociopolitical dimensions and determinants of antitheatrical discourse. In the present essay, I would like to shift my focus from questions of class/status to questions of sex/gender, endeavoring to trace the links between Coriolanus’s antiperformative zeal and his ultra-masculine identity. For though it is true that Coriolanus opposes the dissimulation of others on political grounds (i.e., it creates social confusion), what causes him to reject play-acting in his own person is the sexualized fear that it will unman him (i.e., turn him into a squeaking virgin or crying boy). In this manner, …

Dickens And Shakespeare’S Household Words, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Though Dickens' Shakespearean qualities have often been noted, less attention has been paid to the way that Dickens constructed the terms of his comparison to Shakespeare, scripting the response he received from critics from the nineteenth century to the present and shaping Shakespeare's reception as well. Focusing on The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield in the context of their Victorian reception, this essay shows how Dickens used Shakespearean quotation to market his characters' quotability, turning them into household words and popularizing Shakespeare's sayings in turn, even as he challenged the universality of quotable phrases.

Dickens's Hamlet Burlesque, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Faculty Publications

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner considers what an interlude in Great Expectations involving a spectacularly bad production of Hamlet can do for Hamlet. Specifically, Pollack-Pelzner looks at what Dickens's rendering of Mr. Wopsle's travesty reveals about Hamlet's openness to an audience's derisive laughter. Wopsle’s production may be a travesty, but Dickens’s narrative of that production is a burlesque, with Hamlet as much its target as Wopsle.