30 July 2009 at 10.33 pm (Ben)
Tags: Ben, masques
Well, sort of. Ben’s News from the New World, Discovered in the Moon is not a bad masque, as masques go: it’s full of moon-calf monsters and androgynes, and (for those of us who like such things), of self-referential Ben jokes, helpfully explained in the footnotes of the online edition here.
30 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
(I’m aware that masques make for odd bedtime reading.)
30 July 2009 at 8.35 am (MA studies.)
is busy doing official academic stuff, I plan to visit the early modern section of my new library. I fear I’ll regret this decision once I recall that I don’t have official borrower privileges yet…
30 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
22 July 2009 at 1.05 pm (Ben)
Tags: Ben, Will Shakespeare
for pointing out that poets have been using the hackneyed “poet/know it” rhyme for over 370 years. Gurr records Thos. Heywood’s cynical use of the rhyme in his 1635 The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels: “How comes it (ere he know it) / A puny shall assume the name of poet”.
I’ve finished Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642. Like his Playgoing, it’s a fun read, thought a bit of an odd one. Gurr oscillates between writing that is anecdotal and speculative, and heavy in economic figures and lists of dates. While he offers interpretations of both his economic stats and the plays, poetry and pamphlets he uses as historical documents, he often backs away from drawing conclusions on what his historical narrative means for the plays and poetry themselves. He notes, for example, the parallels and differences between contemporary theatrical audiences and the “crowds” of sport arenas, and the spectators of the Shakespearean stage:
Without realising what we were doing [when rebuilding the Globe theatre for a contemporary audience] we had returned theatre audiences into the role of crowds, and the effect was hugely popular. A crowd is unique in the way it shares the excitement of the experience. Being in a crowd enhances the feeling and makes it a collective, not an individual, pleasure. (259)
Gurr does not consider at length how these different audiences might affect the performative interpretation of a play (beyond that “Nut-crackers” were occasionally disruptive and not well-liked by the dramatists of the period, 279-280). The absence of such considerations is, in part, reflective of Gurr’s scholary ends: his book is more a historical narrative than a piece of literary critcism.
His approach also returns me to the question with which I began the book: how does Gurr’s methodology differ from Greenblatt’s (as he appears to claim in the preface), and, more generally, what is the use of historicism as a tool of literary criticism?
Gurr’s method seems a more sceptical brand of material historicism than Greenblatt’s, which accounts for another reason his text shies away from offering general conclusions about the ways in which historical conditions interact with texts. Frequently, Gurr points to the variability and incompleteness of historical evidence:
In 1608, John Fletcher wrote a careful and ambitious work, The Faithful Shepherdess, essentially an Arcadian pastoral drama of a type played previously only before Court and university audiences. It did not take on its first commercial appearance. [...] Like Dekker’s gulls, the audience that received Fletcher’s play with such lower-class expectation was at the Blackfriars watching a boy company. Shortly afterwards [a year later in 1609], the King’s Men took over the theatre and performed Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster, a modified version of the same kind of play which had an enormous success and created a fashion for tragicomedy to outlast the Stuart reign. Such apparent fickleness and inconsistency on the part of the Blackfriar’s audience is clear warning about the danger of us making too absolute a distinction between the audiences at one kind of playhouse and another. (282)
Gurr repeatedly reminds readers of the impermanence of theatrical performances: audiences, play companies and theatrical conditions constantly mutate, and any number of known (and unknown) material conditions might affect a play’s reception. Neither comparing the two play texts, nor the performances themselves, can adequately account for the failure of one Fletcher text and the success of another text similar in genre and style. Gurr further points to the problems of using textual evidence as a means of reading history; he observes throughout that anti-theatricalists, poets, Lord Mayors, and even bookkeepers tend to exaggerate, while tourists have faulty recollections. Any attempt to historicise, then, must be made cautiously, and on a play-by-play basis.
Not that historicism isn’t useful. Gurr’s observation that around 1630, and owing partly to Henrietta Maria’s attendance at public theatre, along with readings of some of the prologues and epilogues of the Caroline plays, suggests that it became common for court ladies to attend public theatre, perhaps accounts for the sudden appearance of women on Jonson’s Caroline stage, as well as for the some of the odd generic developments of that time…
Finally, I do appreciate that, despite the title, Gurr draws as much from non-Shakespearean examples as he does from Shakespearean texts. This decision, too, derives from his refusal to generalise. Financially solvent, and never imprisoned for debt, slander, or libel, one gets the sense that the iconic Shakespeare was a bit of an anomaly among the dramatists of the time, and that other, censored or charged, play texts reveal more about legal and court history than some of Shakespeare’s works.
Works Cited.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1754-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
22 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
21 July 2009 at 6.55 pm (General musings)
I’m not certain how the process of dust jacket creation works. I imagine it begins with a designer either reading, or hearing about the contents of a book. This designer probably draws a series of mock-ups, which are then discussed with a team of marketers, publishers, editors, and, possibly, the book’s writer. Decisions about typeface and font size are made, an illustrator or photographer hired. At some crucial point, the designer passes the final copy to an editor who looks over the cover for design flaws and typos.
Poor Adam Ardrey: the American edition of his work seems to have missed that last step. While the front fly of the dust jacket, and the spine and pages of the book proper display his title, Finding Merlin, accurately, the spine of the dust jacket (the part that, if the book is standing upright on a store shelf, is the first thing a reader sees), displays the proud title Finding Merln. (The monosyllabic, with that prominent “merl,” comically robs the Arthurian legend of his elegance, no?)
Maybe it’s a marketing strategy: glancing at the book merely, the typo is not immediately grasped, though the glance does leave the impression that something is wrong (we went back for a second look). More probably it’s a glaring error in editing. I wonder what the consequences for such an an oversight are.
The publishing company that produces the book is, of course, delightfully fitting: Overlook Press. (Yes, small coincidences do delight me.)
21 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
21 July 2009 at 1.06 pm (General musings)
This is a fun database in which to play. The BPI is a public access site that disseminates printed images from the holdings of two British museum/archives (the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert). The “browse” formatting is bit trying at times, and there are a few subject categories that contain no images, but these are a minor inconveniences (and ones that are not unexpected in a fledging database).
Some of the images in the “Human Being” and “Society” categories are quite funny — and my, how artists were fascinated with the subject of smoking in those days (the dancing and smoking hunchback is my favourite).
Have fun!
21 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
13 July 2009 at 5.43 pm (General musings)
is why I keep the badly behaved kitten around. Even if she does disrupt my reading. (I like to imagine she’s attempting to write an oration — or at least to decline nouns.)
13 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
11 July 2009 at 3.05 pm (General musings)
Tags: Hero and Leander, Taya
is why I’m going out to study today. Reading while policing this madness is, somehow, a futile effort (to clarify the situation, the Infiltrating Kitten is hunting Hero and Leander, just out of the frame; Taya is, I promise, as annoyed as she appears).
11 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
7 July 2009 at 8.42 pm (General musings)
Tags: Gaurav, Virginia Woolf
It was pretty much the best day of summer thus far, weather wise, yesterday, sudden rain notwithstanding. Gaurav and I took advantage of the occasion to drive to a used book store in Port Colbourne (more accurately, Gaurav drove, while I offered occasionally insightful, but mostly snide remarks from the passenger seat).
At the book store proper, I was, of course, on my best behaviour, browsing, but leaving books on the shelves. I’ll be moving soon, and adding more books to the library is irresponsible. Also, I suspected once I reached the Virginia Woolf section it would be All Over.
My suspicions were apt. It’s difficult to leave behind an American first edition of the first volume of Woolf’s diaries: particularly when the ex libris inscription takes the form of my name.
I’ve made it through the first six weeks, which, as editor Anne Bell points out, forms a kind of “prelude” to Woolf’s endeavour at diary writing. Bell notes that after this six weeks, Woolf descends into an “aggressive and violent period” of madness. While this madness is not necessarily present or predictable in Woolf’s writing (the last entries record Woolf going to tea and buying a “ten & eleven penny blue dress”), one does have the sense that Woolf was, occasionally, a frustrated and angry person:
Considering that my ears have been pure of music for some weeks, I think patriotism is a base emotion. By this I mean (I am writing in haste, expecting Flora to dinner) that they played a national Anthem & a Hymn, & all I could feel was the entire absence of emotion in myself & everyone else. If the British spoke openly about W.C.’s, & copulation, then they might be stirred by universal emotions. As it is, an appeal to feel together is hopelessly muddled by intervening greatcoats & fur coats. I begin to loathe my kind, principally from looking at their faces in the tube. Really, raw beef & silver herrings give me more pleasure to look upon. (“Sunday 3 January,” 5)
Another entry from 5 January reads similarly:
The Times has a queer article upon a railway smash, in which it says that the war has taught us a proper sense of proportion with respect to human life. I have always thought we priced it absurdly high; but I never thought the Times would say so. [...] I bought my fish & meat in the High Street — a degrading but rather amusing business. I dislike the sight of women shopping. They take it so seriously. Then I got a ticket in the Library, & saw all the shabby clerks & dressmakers thumbing illustrated papers, like very battered bees on battered flowers. At least they are warm & dry: & it rains again today. The Belgians downstairs are playing cards with some friends, & talk — talk — talk — while their country is destroyed. After all, they have nothing else to do — (7-8)
There’s enough to be angry with: the war, the frivolity of female roles, Woolf’s exhaustion at maintaining a household and entertaining socially, and (elsewhere in the entries), the effect this exhaustion has on the quality of her writing (“I wrote all the morning, with infinite pleasure, which is queer, because I know all the time there is no reason to be pleased with what I write, & that in 6 weeks or even days, I shall hate it,” 9). It’s fascinating to see how much she restrains the anger in her writing, comparatively, in her fiction and essays; even in anger, however, Woolf writes with wit and satire. One more reason to admire her, I suppose.
7 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
Works Cited.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume One, 1915-1919. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
3 July 2009 at 12.46 am (Ben)
Tags: Ben
From Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642:
Jonson was far more openly opinionated than most of his fellow writers. Quite apart from Sejanus, his Cataline of 1611 is almost certainly a fictitious presentation of the Gunpowder Plot and a defence of his own dubious part in it (like Marlowe before him he seems to have found one source of finance in spying for the government). He was a violent controversialist against several of his fellow poets in his contributions to the so-called Poetomachia, or War of the Theatres, in 1601-2. With all this, however, he was also and always a passionate moralist, a running commentary on the follies of his times. Whatever the players made out of what he sold them, his masques were always statements of opinion, moral and political. The man who could write under a Stuart that ‘a good King is a publike Servant’ was brave as well as outspoken, and no acquiescent royalist. Jonson was imprisoned in 1597 for writing a seditious play, in 1598 for killing a man (a player) in a duel, and in 1605 for another play, Eastward Ho! which he wrote along with Chapman and Marston for the boys of the Blackfriars, in which they satirised the King and his Scottish entourage. (36-37)
Part of me giggles and appreciates this portrayal of Jonson as intriguing spy-murderer-seditionist, but I think Gurr’s description may be the tiniest bit hyperbolic. Cataline, according to Jonson’s preface to the play, was fairly unsuccessful (the play doesn’t seem to have been violently controversial enough to attract the same attention as Middleton’s A Game at Chess), and for all his “brave” advice to James, Jonson was far too dependent upon the income the court masques offered to truly criticise the royal follies in that medium.
It’s a good paragraph, nonetheless. More attention than Ben usually receives.
3 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
2 July 2009 at 7.03 pm (Ben, MA studies.)
Tags: Ben, John Marston, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Richard Brome, thesis
I’ll be writing an MA thesis in about eight weeks. This is not exactly news — I wrote the proposal eight months ago — but thinking about that time frame is a bit startling nonetheless. I think my somewhat confused look in response to the “what are you writing” question is beginning to instill doubts in those around me, so I’ve decided to have another look at that proposal and draw up some tentative reading material for the rest of the summer.
For the record, I’m writing about the relationship between performativity, early modern stage conditions, and representations of female communities in Jonson’s Caroline drama. Thus far I’ve been reading generally some of that previously unread early modern drama and poetry (Marston, Brome, Nashe, Tasso, Lyly, Greene &c.). It will probably also be productive to start having a look over some of the theory from which I’ll be drawing. To this end, I’ve picked up more Judith Butler (yes, I will finish Bodies That Matter this time around) and Luce Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman. I also finally acquired Andrew Gurr’s The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642 (4th edition!), a work that is fun, though with a slightly puzzling preface. Gurr observes that he originally released the work “long before New Historicism’s elevation of the anecdote as good history” (x). I’m not certain if Gurr is attempting to distinguish his methodology from Greenblatt’s, or if he’s merely claiming he got there first (it’s difficult to pinpoint the differences only 15 pages into the introduction, so I’ll have to leave this question momentarily unaddressed).
I’ve also been editing the last chapter of last summer’s thesis. It’s somewhat problematic in that it appears to be two strains of thought that never really come together by the end. It’s a terrifying experience every time I reread it. I shall have to avoid that kind of writing the next time around…
2 July 2009 ~ St. Catharines
Works Cited.
Gurr, Andrew. The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. (And thank you, Gaurav, for finding this.)
