Class Notes (for 9/22)

• Titus showing @ 6:30 pm on Monday.
  

• Multiple critical editions compared and contrasted as potential standards for the collaborative project: Arden editions Vs. very traditional editions edited by Charles Forker (ex. Edward II Revels edition) Vs. “Texts & Contexts” series Vs. Bedford Critical Controversy editions (ex. The Tempest)
  

Emily’s Presentation

• Does Anne's decision and eventual death truly reflect a pious act of contrition, or can it also be read as an empowered act that resists the patriarchal strictures of her contemporary society? Ultimately the answer to this question has to address issues of agency and identity.
• How is food understood in the play before Anne’s self-starvation?
1. Action of the play often follows moments of eating.
2. Transgressive/erotic act of eating dinner in Anne’s private quarters.
3. Both Nicholas and Cranwell have moments when they find themselves unable to eat.
4. Wendoll and Frankford’s relationship (which can be read as either homosocial or homoerotic) mediated through food.
   

• Who is more active in Anne’s death, Anne or Frankford? Whose kindness kills Anne?
• The text is indeterminate in a way that the play would not be in performance. For example, the epilogue emphasizes the subjectivity of viewers/readers. How and where does the play open up interpretive space?
  

Responses/Discussion

• Anne is calculated, almost passionless in her response to Frankford?
• What does Anne want her body to be? Does she want to defile or deconstruct/destroy her body? Does her starvation work to make her unreadable/disappear?
• Anne denies her own agency when she confronts Wendoll (she blames him as a devil).
• The play fits within a Medieval morality tradition, in which people are merely companions to vice figures (Anne and Wendoll). Frankford offers a spectacle of temperance in the face of sin (a parallel to Jesus). There seems to be a critical amnesia associated with both actual social/legal history and the Medieval theatrical tradition that is represented in the play.
• A group frustration is expressed about the inability of Frey, etc., to make an argument. These sources are all context, no substance.
• Self-starvation allows Anne to cast herself differently. She can now constitute herself through lack/nothingness.
• There is a critical history of ignoring the subplot.
• Female self-sacrifice is sexy: women’s sexuality is predicated upon fabulous, disappearing chastity. Susan’s marriageability is related to their lack of desire to get married. Heywood demonstrates why women might not want to get married. People had bodies in history and they had to not use them (to stay alive).
• Nicholas’ bodily suffering emphasized.
• Nicholas is the only character at the end who refuses to participate in the spectacle of Anne’s death.
• Frankford and Anne are Christ figures.
• Anne has Orphic power. Lute as stand-in for Anne's body.
• Heywood sets up a contrast between middle-class property and spare language that characters use to divest themselves of property. What’s up with those kids?!? They are props. Children have to be decontaminated. Self-starvation as abortion? What the fruit of that adultery might be? Could Anne be destroying the evidence of her crime with Wendoll? Self-starvation a way out of bodily exchange.
• Ellen's reading: What Heywood is dramatizing is a new marriage system and the difficulty of marital discord in this system.
• What is the meaning of food/props in this text? Does food represent the erotic or the domestic/hospitable?
• How conspicuous would the language/presentation of food on stage be for an original audience? VERY conspicuous, this is very demanding play for the stage manager.
• Ellen’s “non-conclusive conclusion”: We have an expectation that good drama is somehow not didactic, but there can be an eros within a pedagogical framework. Let’s think of revulsion in Titus in terms of a reaction to didactic drama.

Presentation Teaser (for 9/22)

In the section dealing with Heywood in "The Age of Shakespeare," Swinburne writes of this play that "Anne is never really alive till on her death-bed." I think many would agree that Anne's character becomes vivid and exciting to us in the text primarily, or even exclusively, through her chosen death. I will be focusing our discussion tomorrow on the question we began to pursue during our last class meeting and through our previous critical readings: Does Anne's decision and eventual death truly reflect a pious act of contrition, or can it also be read as an empowered act that resists the patriarchal strictures of her contemporary society? One thing that intrigues me in particular about this question is that these options are not mutually exclusive. An entire range of readings is possible. Consequently, perhaps even more than in other texts, the performance decisions in stagings of this play can radically alter our understanding of the characters, and I'm interested in discussing how that fact is reflected in the ambivalence of the words themselves. I plan to do this through an examination of how Heywood mediates the subject through language of food, reflection/mirroring, and embodiment.

One external theoretical idea I'd like to make available for discussion is somewhat anachronistic in its approach, but hopefully useful regardless. In her article “Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism,” Gillian Brown shows different ways in which we can conceptualize anorexia and how the practice of anorexia can contribute to identity formation in a paradoxically positive way. She claims that liberal humanism, born in the work of Locke and Rousseau and afterwards increasingly integral to our cultural attitudes, “has aligned individual worth with the capacity of the individual to augment himself through his labors.” A person is only worth as much as he or she can accumulate -- or have the potential to accumulate -- through action. In this light, Brown claims that, regardless of eventual physical impact, “the anorectic can be seen as exercising her right to free speech and privacy and to the management of herself.” As the anorectic subject loses weight physically, she gains something psychologically. Brown thus claims that anorexia provides a way of studying “how individuals come to matter through their acts, attributes, and accumulations,” and ultimately shows the ways in which anorectics determine not only a sense of self-worth but also a sense of self-ownership and even identity through the process of loss. Although Brown's article focuses very specifically on a post-Enlightenment culture of humanism, I wonder if Brown articulates here some of the ideas we might use to theorize Anne's death as an exercise of power rather than a surrender of it.

Class Notes 9/20

• Edward II clip attempted
• then there was a fire alarm
• thoughts on Diderot and All My Sons:
• people versus actors: difficulty following through on instructions of empathy – the unknown actors responded to more as voids – wondering if Ellen lied to us
• these actors don’t have a celebrity dimension – Ellen happens to know these biographical facts
• resonance of the Diderot article – used to be more of a desire to see an actor struggling through something correlated to real life, but now that’s not how “good theatre” markets itself
• Miller’s often critiqued for being heavy-handed ideologically – something we try to distance ourselves from it
• Another reaction: harder to be unmoved by that heavy-handedness because of knowledge of actors’ experience
• Seduction scene b/t mother and surrogate son – related to how seduction operates as the fundamental term for describing the bond of show to playgoer
• Edward II clips, take 2
• Condemnation of an aspirational middle-class
• Choice of displaying Spencer’s death as potentially within the imaginings of Edward – rationale for the lugubrious temporality Stephen brought up
• Whiteness at the end à associating the whitewashed history with filth
• Interpretation of Edward III – perfect reproduction between queer father and seemingly queer son – c.f. No Future – Edward II a manifestation of homosexuality that is not at odds with heterosexual reproduction (consequently very different in its imagining of teleology than same-sex female desire)
• Elegy at the end, juxtaposed with image of Edward III’s continuing reign
• Eric’s presentation
• Talk about the genres at work in this play – caught off-guard by how it functioned, made sense to him in ways that other plays didn’t make sense, this seems like something out of 19^th-century parlor players
• In contrast to genres of Galatea (classical, pastoral, jumble) and Edward II (tragic history) – this play doesn’t do those things, turns to women and domesticity
• Shift in theatre history, reflects a change happening in the larger theatre market and in the theatre’s relationship with the audience
• G & EII in conversation with the aristocracy; even if they’re playing with and undermining those ideas of aristocracy, still dealing with them
• Heywood seems to be appealing to a broader audience (bourgeois?), non-aristocratic – theatre at this point becoming more and more popular, making more money, so marketing to more people is more important
• Domestic tragedy genre has interesting ways of relating to the audience
• Domestic staging: takes place in the home
• Stage directions to servants
• New commodities
• Wedding festival
• Dancing ending the scene – folk
• Servant comes out and talks to the audience (we’re on a different time schedule)
• The stage and the audience are working with a shared social and moral order – the stage is symptomatic of / mirroring / offering different ways of imagining issues and themes the audience would be interesting in engaging with
• Allows the audience to see & imagine heterosexual marriage and homosocial bonding
• Two different views of marriage
• F&W&A: marriage within a structure of affect, a lot of talk about desire, love (contrasted with S&)
• Heywood reimagines the story of cuckoldry – in this case, not humorous, cuckold isn’t the public fool – it’s inner pain, it’s taking place in the home – there are some funny parts but not in the same way
• Domestic tragedy: making serious the problem of adultery
• Play stages interiority – audience is privy to a sense of interiority we haven’t seen in G or EII
• Scene VIII, card game
• Opportunities for asides
• Instead of a violent response, he’s reserved and is satisfied to make passive-aggressive comments (representation of sexuality as a play of wit)
• F deciding to leave reveals the strength of his emotions; he deserts the game of wit, unwilling to take part – he’s going to reset the stage, terms of marriage
• Card game is with a guest, so also has the sense of public performance (when F leaves, signals that he wants the action to go even more into the privacy of the marriage)
• Frey & Lieblin
• If we do buy their argument, what does it say about agency? queer sense of agency
• New performance of it interprets Anne’s starvation as disappearance rather than agency (bringing in Rutter) – Frey & Lieblin might be overlooking the significance of performance decisions
• Class discussion of card game
• Hard to read: no gorgeous language, total transparency, but difficult when it comes to these highly referential scenes of which we don’t know much of the historical context
• Parallels scenes of seduction and foreplay, but it’s darker (queering the idea of foreplay by transgressing the marital boundary)
• Concern in the play with how effectively people can read each other’s bodies – Anne’s fears of F knowing right away are never realized; it’s only once he’s informed that he starts seeing confirmation
• Cranwell like the audience, but stuck onstage (we’re watching him watching them) – is he the corroborating witness or is he oblivious?
• How much of this is double entendre? How much of this is she playing along with vs being oblivious? F walking off: frustration with the impossibility of reading the situation? Related to the frustration of how to read the scene as director / performer
• Discourse of mirroring, but also a condemnation of comparison as base – these come to play in the card game in which comparisons and double entendres are constantly taking place
• Becomes more than just the mechanics of entrapment – an uncanny exposure of the difficulty theatre has in bringing things to light
• Competing forms of masculinity (parallel to the hunt) – fight for money, Anne discussed in terms of money/currency
• Difficulty of reading Anne’s character: is this a moral tale? Should we see similitude to resistant women familiar to us? There’s every opportunity to also read difference.
• This play goes in a different direction than others in the same tradition: Anne doesn’t become a horrible transgressor
• Frey & Lieblin don’t deal with the reality that this would have been performed by a male body
• Illegibility of upper-class adultery (versus the usual low-class cuckoldry tales) – how does this fit with money, economy?
• W/F relationship, homosocial bond
• F feeling proud of his rise in the class, keeps W around in a sort of mentor capacity
• Idea at the time that men should open their homes to people in need – Heywood shows us the danger (c.f. Gaveston sitting in EII’s throne) – in this way (and others), he’s also a victim of the patriarchal system
• Competing ideas – marriage brings young men into household ownership, brought through a proper meeting of husband and wife – paradoxical strain of man and wife meant to meet as equals but also for the wife to become part of the man’s body hierarchically (pattern of dramatization of men killing their wives)
• Seduction scene (p. 369)
• She has every excuse marshaled to her defense, ultimately just runs out of ideology – her running out of words leads to her capitulation – least emphatic expression possibly
• Lack of mutuality à makes it difficult to set up a blamable Anne, but we also don’t see her make declarations to F
• It’s because they stick so closely to the marital lesson that they suffer for it
• Interiority
• Not just Anne’s lack, but also Wendell’s – his total capitulation to his desire (almost effeminate in that capitulation to desire is coded as female)
• Crazy amounts of display in the physical set vs. the hollowness of the characters, who even when they say things are really saying nothing
• Sedgwick triangulation reading possible
• Lack of affect, plenty of effect
• Recommended reading: Elizabethan Households and Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England, both by Lena Orlin

Preview for tomorrow

A large part of what I would like to talk about tomorrow will involve genre. I know so little about Early Modern drama, and yet there is something so recognizable to me about A Woman Killed with Kindness. I could easily see this play as if it were written and performed in the 19^th or early 20^th century. In some ways it is a bourgeois play about morality, marriage, domesticity, new money, class, and a woman’s body. I’d like us to start thinking of the large generic differences between this play and Edward II and Galatea, and its variation from a traditionally comic tale of cuckoldry (Chaucer and a bearded lady first come to mind). I would also like to talk about how the play constructs emotions, interiority, and playfulness, particularly in the card game in scene 8.

A performance of A Woman Killed with Kindness was just staged over the summer (it just ended last week) in England. This version of the play takes place in 1919. Below are two links. One is for an advertisement for the play which presents an interpretation of Anne’s starvation as disappearance, something which may be at odds with Frey’s interpretation of Anne in his article. I think it is worthwhile to consider how much our interpretation of Anne depends on how the character is performed (I’m thinking of Rutter here). While we haven’t read the starvation scene yet, and I don’t want to impinge on next Thursday’s discussion, I think it’s worthwhile to add this contemporary performance to our understanding of Frey’s article.

The second link is a review of the performance, which interprets Anne’s starvation as disappearance. Check out the affective overload of Anne’s guilt. I’m not sure how Frey would take this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMpmLnPcHgU

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jul/20/a-woman-killed-with-kindness-review

Steven's Presentation

Steven's presentation focused on two important issues in Edward II: repetition and the double body. I think we were all relieved to address the tedious nature of the play and laugh at Stevens "jokes"... Natalie confessed to falling asleep while reading the play, and I should say that I did too... Steven brought us back to think about how the play constructed a very slow progression of time through the use of repetition and how this conceit created an affective experience. Two of his examples that were very poignant were how one scene will perform an action only to then have a character recount that scene in a narrative, causing the audience to live through it twice, though of course with a difference. The second example was how Edward quickly relocates his desire to Spencer Jr. after Gaveston dies, repeating the plot of the previous acts.

We were all keen to discuss the use of repetition and slow time. I couldn't keep track of who said what, but here are some topics that came up. When the script repeats in narrative what we would have already seen in performance, we get to see non-verbal reactions on stage, such as when we see Gaveston captured and then hear it recounted to see Edward's reaction. This use of repetition allows us also to get different perspectives on events. In a play that really messes with our affective attachments to characters, this change in perspective is important. Along with the slowness of time in the play we also get a number of metaphors of weight and heaviness, which contrasts to Edward's desire for lightness. After Edward dies, however, the pace of the play picks up at a strangely quick speed. The play reestablishes a sense of order with Edward III taking over and killing Mortimer and imprisoning Isabella

In terms of the kings double body and the performance of of king-ness, we discussed how Edward goes back and forth between the kingly body and his corporeal body, particularly dramatized when he gives up and takes back the crown several times. Marlowe seems to be pushing us here to question if the person and the king can be separated. He also points to how much the role of the king is itself a performance which relies on the agreement of the court. For example, when Mortimer and his allies decide to no longer agree to Edward's performance as king, Edward is deposed.

We then went on to discuss Baines Libel and Phelan's chapter.

Blog Teaser: Time and Performance in Marlowe’s Edward II

The stage can do strange things to time, compressing an hour into a few minutes or making a suspenseful second feel like an eternity. Christopher Marlowe is a master of such effects. In my presentation I will attempt to focus our attention on Marlowe’s command of time in Edward II.

My own thinking on this topic has led me to a number of paradoxical conclusions. The first of these conclusions is that although the play compresses historical years into theatrical hours, this play nevertheless feels very, very long. I will spend much of the presentation attempting to explain how I think Marlowe accomplishes his feats of temporal dilation. For example, one technique crucial to the play’s management of time is the use of foreshadowing. In Edward II Marlowe’s foreshadowing makes the action of the play seem pointless and painful, and makes the audience impatient to reach the inevitable conclusion. A second, and to my mind even more effective technique for lengthening the play, however, is repetition. And while I will save my own favorite examples of the play’s repetitions for class, I ask that you please look for some examples on your own that we might compile a comprehensive list. What’s more, while it is my opinion that the play’s repetitive language and structure give it a hopeless, endless, even traumatic dimension, I encourage you to please consider if you agree or disagree with the argument that Marlowe’s use of foreshadowing and repetition make the play seem longer. What was your experience of reading this play? Did it seem long to you?

I also plan to briefly contrast the effects that Marlowe creates in this play with the ones that he uses in Doctor Faustus, particularly in Faustus’ final scene. If you are unfamiliar with that play here is a link to Dylan Thomas reading Faustus’ final monologue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUGq5yMUKMI (although I hope that you’ll understand the point that I’m making without knowing Faustus and I don’t think that you should feel obligated to watch the clip).

Finally, although I haven’t really come up with a smooth way to transition into it, I will also be covering Phelan’s chapter and hope to use it to extend Thursday’s fascinating discussion about Edward’s performance of the role of king. If possible, please start to think about what Phelan might help us to say about Edward II’s performance of his role, and whether or not Edward is a bad performer who cannot perform the kinghood or a great performer who is able to extend the role to remarkable lengths.

Minutes for L634 Meeting of 09/08/’11 Discussing Marlowe’s Edward II

Here I will offer only a brief description of Priya’s presentation as her own handout summarizes it better than I could hope to:

· She started by describing the history behind the play. There were in fact widespread rumors about Edward’s homosexuality/bisexuality during his reign.

· Marlowe’s play was published five weeks after his death. It is based largely on Holinshed’s account of Edward II’s reign although Marlowe compresses and dramatizes the historian’s work.

· Some critics have seen Marlowe as highly moral while others see him as deeply subversive.

· She quoted Act I Scene 4 lines 401-418 and discussed Bruce Smith’s argument that the play’s nobles are less angry at Gaveston for his homosexuality than for his social climbing. She held that Smith’s account may underestimate the importance of gender and sexuality in the play’s conflicts.

· She also discussed Smith’s argument that this play is something of a reversal of the traditional master/minion relationship in that Edward seems to be effeminized despite inhabiting the master’s role.

Discussed:

· It was suggested that Priya’s first question should be modified in a way that would require us to also think about the play’s discourse of nationalism. Evidence of this discourse was said to include the nobles’ references to Gaveston’s French heritage. It was clarified that this national discourse was an anachronism that dealt with national rivalries in a way that would have been legible to Marlowe’s audience but would not have made as much sense to Edward II and his contemporaries.

· It was noted that Edward II is a particularly early example of an English history play. It was further noted that this play is closely related to Shakespeare’s Richard II. Likewise, Edward’s choosing of favorites seems analogous to what we currently know about King James I.

· It was explained that Gaveston was the first invented Duke in the history of English royalty. There was the suggestion that such favoritism might not have been unrelated to the rise of Puritanism.

· It was noted that many of the complaints about Gaveston are related to his clothing. The noting of this pattern led to a discussion of sumptuary laws (laws put in place to govern to stop non-Aristocrats from dressing too well and consequently threatening the previously rigid and almost-enforceable stratification of English society). Significantly, these laws also extended to cross-dressing.

· English playwrights often played to their audience’s sense of themselves as common and plainly dressed as opposed to the fancy peoples of the continent. Related to this phenomenon are the previously noted complaints about Gaveston’s clothes, which are often said to be Italian.

· It was posited that while Smith argues that the nobility’s anger is centered around Gaveston’s social climbing rather than his homosexuality, the nobility’s anger about Gaveston’s social climbing might in fact be a mere stand in for a sexual prejudice that couldn’t be directly represented.

· Our attention was drawn to Act 2 Scene 1 Lines 31-43, wherein Spencer Junior argues that masculinity is not defined by show but by action. It was wondered if this sentiment goes against the grain of the rest of the play.

· The discourse of the “natural” and “unnatural” was invoked, and it was suggested that lying, and particularly Isabella’s lying, might be what the play finds most unnatural. This point led to a discussion of Marlowe’s tendency to avoid the naturalizing discourse that Lyly made so popular.

· All of which led to a fuller discussion of Marlowe’s style. Marlowe was noted to be a very savvy stylist, the wielder of the mighty line, in fact, and therefore it was found to be significant that this play tends to avoid figurative language. The play’s music was characterized as dirge-like. It was posited that the play almost demands us to read it with a hermeneutics of suspicion that we might discover where the pleasure in it resides. This idea was given the following strongly-worded formulation: this play is almost determined not to be liked.

· The mutable love of Isabella for Edward was contrasted with the apparently unchanging love between Edward and Gaveston. It was suggested that the play seems to raise the question: how can the viewer tell if a love is authentic? How is such love represented on stage? in life? It was noted that Isabella begs Edward to look at her body and her tears as signification of her authentic love. (Later our attention would be drawn to Act II Scene 3 and we will be asked to consider Kent’s attempt to perform authenticity).

· In response to a comment about the Revel’s edition’s stage directions it was noted that the formalized fawning of court rhetoric is so over the top that it can be difficult to tell when the nobles are being ironic and when they are offering due reverence. Marlowe’s nobles are never sincere—they are either being sarcastic or being forced into outrageous deference.

· Smith takes as part of his discussion the absolutely crucial question: where does Marlowe direct his audience’s sympathies? An answer was ventured: Marlowe only makes the romantic relationship between Edward and Gaveston sympathetic. The problems of government are not really personalized and made sympathetic.

· Much was said on the subject of performing the role of king. It was noted that this subject was a pervasive and popular one and that many plays, from Edward II to Shakespeare’s history plays, got a great deal of mileage out of raising questions about everything from the morality of usurpation to the problems of the marriage of convenience. These plays questioned not only what it meant to be but what it meant to perform the role of royalty.

· With regard to the play currently under discussion, it was argued that because Edward II did not have the respect of his court, when he refused to play the role of king in the “appropriate manner” there was nothing holding his government in place. His failed performance led everything to fall apart—leading to both his chance for a radical self-refashioning as well as the political revolt against him. It was noted that Edward similarly refuses to play the “appropriate” or traditional role of husband/lover with regard to Isabella.

· Here a most interesting distinction was made. While Edward might not play the role of “king” particularly well from a traditional point of view, he nevertheless does possess some rhetorical talent and can be seen as working to forge a new role entirely, to stage manage an entirely new type of rule.

· It was argued that the Edward/Gaveston relationship is childish—childish in a playful way but also childish in a dark, vengeful way.

· It was argued that the Nobles’ decision to rule in Edward’s name mirrors the king’s earlier offer to split up his kingdom.

· A compelling comment was made to the effect that Edward and Gaveston rule together as if they were trying to inhabit one kingly body. (Later it would be suggested that, finding his second, divine body of little use, Edward attempts to replace it with Gaveston).

· The relationship between Edward and Gaveston was further discussed. It was claimed that one of the things that Edward wants from Gaveston is to share some of the stress of kinghood with his friend. Gaveston, for his part, is willing to imagine such a thing, even though in Marlowe’s time such an imaginative leap constituted a thought crime in and of itself. This shared imagining was posited as a crucial part of the play’s erotics.

· Finally, our attention was directed to Act I Scene 4 Lines 272-. Here Marlowe, never a lazy writer, uses bad dialogue to make a point. He registers that something is deeply out of joint in the kingdom, and by emphasizing the insincere language of the court, he challenges his audience to remember to search for moments of authentic desire.