Epicene, Day 1

In Mary Bly’s article for Tuesday, she quotes J. Grieg’s theory of humor:

Nothing is laughable in itself … the laughable borrows its special quality from some person or group of persons who happen to laugh at it, and, unless you happen also to know a good deal about this person or group of persons, you cannot by any means guarantee the laugh before hand. (139)

Laughter, by both Grieg and Bly’s measure, is both social and in many ways constructive; for there to be laughter, there must be people to get the joke, who are capable of comprehending whatever sociocultural touchpoints the joke sounds or exploits. Bly in particular is interested how homoerotic puns in boys’ plays were “read” by those who knew to look for them – in other words, how these comedies allowed for a sense of (homo)erotic community.

Jonson’s prologue to Epicene telegraphs to the audience an expectation of a rather expansive play in this regard: the poet’s “cates” will be diverse, some “fit for ladies: some for lords, knights squires; / Some for waiting-wench, and city-wires; / Some for your men and daughters of Whitefriars” (22-23).

For class, I’d like to use this notion of the socio-comic to put Jonson’s Prologue to the test, for while laughter may help us build communities, we can’t help but laugh at someone or something. So a simple question: in Epicene, who/what do we laugh at, and why? In the play’s social laughter, who is excluded, and what sort of community is thereby birthed?

Speaking of birth, another thing I’d like to pay close attention to is another kind of community-building: actual human reproduction. Morose, for instance, plots to sire an heir to push Dauphine out of his estate, thus instigating the action of the play. Another particularly pregnant passage (sorry) to think about might be this exchange from (in my edition) II.iii.109-124:

DAW. Silence in a woman is like speech in a man,

Deny ’t who can.

DAUPHINE. Not I, believe it; your reason, sir.

DAW. Nor is’t a tale,

That female vice should be a virtue male,

Or masculine vice a female virtue be.

You shall it see

Proved with increase;

I know to speak, and she to hold her peace.

Do you conceive me, gentlemen?

DAUPHINE. No, faith; how mean you with increase, Sir John?

DAW. Why, with increase is when I court her for the common cause of mankind, and she says nothing, but consentire videtur, and in time is gravida.

DAUPHINE. Then this is a ballad of procreation?

CLERIMONT. A madrigal of procreation, you mistake.

Here we have a nice convergence of what I think is Epicene’s relationship to laughter and the community it builds, along with the play’s apparent ideas on the messier, more biological parts of community-building. But what exactly I’m drawing from it I’ll save for class, and allow you all to formulate your own ideas given the lines of thought I’ve laid out, or your own inclinations.

Other things I won’t touch on as explicitly but which I’d really like to discuss are the nature and implications of the play’s apparent misogyny, the ways in which the staging of this play might affect its tone (would child actors make it seem less meanspirited, for instance, and in this regard we might want to think of Michael Witmore’s thesis on Jonson), and the rather unusual and complex relationship between Clerimont, Truewit, and Dauphine.

Until tomorrow, happy reading, and see you all in class!

Notes for 10/27 Meeting (Poster Session)

NB: I apologize for not catching all of Ellen’s comments and advice, and specifically the names of several of the authors she recommended; my little fingers twren't fast enough

Lucy: (Riff Raff) pursuing Victorian studies, and specifically the relationship of animals to nationalism, a sense of state and imperialism; Lucy ties these concepts to certain animal-oriented in passages from Edward II, Chaste Maid, and Titus

Tracey: (Taste) exploring the idiom of eating and tasting as they relate to both theatre and reading (the play as pie, the digestion of a work), which expands upon her interests in Titus; looking at the consuming/consumer/and the consumed, and the relationship between food and medical realms, such as food’s relation to pregnancy
Ellen: consider ties between food and humoral theory, as well as the bizarre “mummy” cure of the period

Emily: (witness/gaze/spectacle) the gaze’s relationship with performance, in terms of how performances within a performance conflate perceptions (the audience watches actors watching other actors); how do issues of sexuality and identity appear in these tensions of performance; how do performances work in a pointed, explicit direction in light of inevitable contradictions to and questionings of that intended direction; conversely, how might performances be designed to be open and invite individual responses that can still cohere more than might be expected
Ellen: look to audience studies, which have altered recently; consider also anti-theatricalists’ take on women’s spectators in particular

Abby: (ravish) the term is used to denote spiritual ravishing as well as sexual ravishing, and is used to denote rape specifically at a later period; interested in questions of who can ravish/be ravished
Ellen: think about monkey ravishment (both people ravishing monkeys, and vice versa; on stage and in real life)!

Steven: (odious comparisons) originally saw this concept in Women Killed with Kindness, but is really a common phrase; the oddness of this phrase in a play given the pervasive similarities, substitutions, and comparisons in plays;
Ellen: look to Manon on autonomy as queerness; look to the paratextual material at the opening of plays; Jonson especially seems weary of comparison, the anxiety of comparing plays to plays

Eric: (affect and bodies) focusing on the staging of bodies and the affective relationships produced on stage when bodies get eroticized; modelling his approach especially on Varnado’s ease with unknowing when bodies are being erotic or sexual; the continuous threat that bubbles through the role when boys are dressed as girls; considering ways of simultaneously being boy and girl, maintaining a sense of unknown
Ellen: Stallybrass deals with this constant doubleness and considers what the anatomical expectations of drama may be; look also to Michael Neil on Othello

Priya: (virginity) investigating the female body as it overlaps with science, religion and history; the fabilization of female bodies becoming fact based upon Vesalius’s dissection of bodies; Catholic/Protestant differences over how to conceptualize the body’s relationship to purity and faith; Elizabeth I’s relationship to sex given her parents’ ribald sexual history and how these interact with cultural/historical remembrances of sexuality and their performance; Lucrece and Philomel are again fables that turn into fact through repetitive performance and processes of metafiction
Ellen: Paster’s work may be useful for looking at humoral fantasies along gender lines; you might also look to an 11th century nun’s plays about female martyrs wherein women maintain their virginity in amazing circumstances, which reflect patriarchal demands for purity and their absurdity

John: (investment) consider the overlapping relationship of finance, religious authority, clothing and performativity: social position, power, authority etc. as put in the clothes and the words associated with them, especially in royal ceremonies
Ellen: consider Materials of Memory by Jones and Stallybrass, looking at the economics of clothing; the props and clothing were aristrocatic hand-me-downs, so that the atristocrats are never gone on stage; Shakespeare’s Richard II would have used clothes from Richard’s period; clothing was highly visible and recognizable during the period, especially that of the aristocracy on stage

Mara (luxury): the term is associated with consumptive sins (overly rich clothes, food) but also with natural cycles; these economies combine within capitalism with consumerism, and they must obsolesce so that we can desire more of them; we consume goods but also art; economies of spectatorship and visceral hunger are involved as well
Ellen: consider Enders on deaths within drama; her book Death by Drama reviews how spectatorship encounters the economies of the body

Natalie (blush): her interests lies at the intersection of affect studies, modernist assemblages and aesthetics, performance/theatre and Amy Cook’s idea of performance as a shaping exercise that leaves a trace on the body; affect can have patterns (how are we supposed to feel at specific moments) as well as unique and personal, and yet also alienating and make you feel powerless; her project will explore the “weird terrain” of affect
Ellen: maybe think about the potential for disaster within performance and its embarrassment; actor training discussions at the period might be a resource as well

Savannah (disease): stemming from her interest in the AIDS crisis in Africa as it pushes against or responds to discourses in the west; interest in venereal disease, specifically syphilis given its stageability and its associations with foreignness, the body of the (French) other; this ties with her interest in French cabaret, the foreign body as a site of excessive desire, as well as to modern dance more specifically, given its inspiration by African dance; these discourses all continue to influence modern conceptualizations of disease; she will also look to disease’s affiliation with the monstrous
Ellen: consider Jonson’s Masque of Blackness; Prynne’s conflation of disease, prostitution, and the foreign-born queen’s body, and their meeting in the realm of theatre and specifically dance drama; for veneral disease, look to Gillman on the French disease and the pox

Notes from 10/25: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside

Class notes for L636 – 10/25/11

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, Acts III-V

“Leaky Vessels” by Paster

Presenters: Abby & John

Presentations

John:

• Recap of the blog: the oddity of this play at a structural level; multiple plots and subplots, various appearing and disappearing characters; “episodic blips”
• The logic and rationale of the play, and the play’s discussion thereof, as it relates to games and chance; luck vs logic, rule vs hazard; how are these related?
• McLuskie says: the characters that win are the characters that can game the system
• End of scene IV and beginning of scene V: Tim and the Tutor’s discussion of transitive and analogous logic makes a travesty of the system
• Tim demonstrates the basic irrationality of the “rules” we game, a rationality McC seems to take for granted
• Ending of a play has no linear, teleological development; it is “chronic”; a number of developments and renegotiations
• As we’ve discussed, Changeling makes us question our complicity in the play’s action; perhaps Chaste Maid similarly draws our attention to a complicity in an usual, possibly “queer” illogical/logical system or society

Abby:

• Allwit’s motto about gamesters: this term could also refer to theater, while the “box” (“sure a winner”) could also refer to the audience; draws attention to the audience’s complicity in these games
• How does the house win? What does it mean to win or lose? What exactly is at stake?
• How does this relation between gaming and wobbly logic relate to the city environment of the play?
• Does, as Paster claim, the play reseal the leaky women, and reseal the wobbly logic, plaster the cracks in ideology? Or does it actually draw attention to these things? Does Middleton actually highlight the validity of fool as wise creature?

Class Discussion

• SEX
• So much sex
• Not even just marriage, constant talk of sex and procreation
• Bodies are meat, babies are a lamb
• Sex games – intrigue, cuckoldry, bed-tricks
• How does the play complicate the idea of having sex is winning?
• Allwit wins by not sexing his wife; he is her pimp; does the play undermine this idea?
• The wife wins; she wants sex, she gets it, she gets a lot of material recompense
• Teleology of sex: we need to have babies (or not have babies)
• But it’s interesting in how we have so many characters who just don’t WANT sex; no one is settled; there’s a disruption of the sexual disjunction common to comedy (people want to bone but can’t) and instead we have people maneuvered into positions where sex is demanded but not desired
• Women love sex, however; women desire greatly; men seem to benefit by abstaining
• Women not only want sex, they SHOULD want sex
• Control of the sex of daughters and wives; consider the lack of control of Yellowhammer over Moll, Allwit over his wife, Kix over his wife
• Maudlin gives Moll so much grief for not being lascivious
• Cuckoldry: Yellowhammer’s response to Whorehound’s behavior is not horror at W but horror at Allwit
• Middleton’s gambit in making the Allwits’ victory is perhaps to underscore the absurd horror of cuckoldry
• The “functional” Yellowhammers are catastrophic parents, public embarrassments, manipulative of their chidlren
• Allwits care for the children who are not really their “own” – the only actual affectionate relationship
• Ellen: ”Middleton gives us a shocking display of the carnality that makes patriarchy work”
• injustice of its dependence on reproduction, which cannot be guaranteed despite ethics or virtue
• The characters who really come out ahead by sacrificing nothing on their own behalf
• Comprehensive, holistic reading is difficult, since it is so much about the fractures of a civic environment, lapses in social performance
• Does not capitulate to its own carnivalesque tendencies, like Knight of the Burning Pestle; a sense of wholeness is here that does not come from Knight
• characters are not wholly bad or good; they can be foils or dupes depending on contexts, but never truly villainous
• Wit and winning seem to be bigger forces in the lives of characters than their social or gender scripts; rules are made to be broken
• Cf. the country wench comes out ahead despite her abject position
• Allwit’s position is similarly abject but he triumphs
• Both achieve these through wit, winning, trickery

• Chase Maid a city comedy: we have yet to see an unorthodox rep; Knight deconstructs
• Middleton expresses an concern with the increasing theatricality of city life in London
• Convention of the goldsmith and the goldsmith’s daughter
• Goldshops: women creep into early capitalist market by being vendors, displaying jewelry; luring in men, selling the jewelry; cf. the Yellowhammers’ “selling” of their daughter
• Aristocratic estates are expensive and unsustainable so many poor aristocrats attempt to infuse with money from the upper-middling sort
• Yellowhammers try to raise their son up like a gentlemen, but are inept; they can buy tutors education but they can’t make it work
• New social dependencies coming to light in a society attempting to preserve its aristocratic traditions
• In this play, the systems are brought out and put on display
• These are the ways by which you work! You the audience!
• The only way to win is to whore out daughter/wife, to let others shore themselves up by using the structures you’ve already put into place
• Social roles in the play are presumably reflected in the contemporary audience; affectionately mocked and bolstered by the play

• Re: Melissa Jones, do we see any expressions of sexuality unconfined by patriarchal norms of sexuality?
• Moll doesn’t seem to be greatly enfranchised by Middleton
• Whorehound, chosen by her parents, not as wealthy as he appears
• She ends up with another younger brother, similarly financially unstable, since older Touchwood has already collapsed his estate
• Is there anything to LIKE about Touchwood Jr?
• The… the ring part?
• A happy fraternal relationship with Touchwood Sr; join forces to game society, help each other out
• If Sr is poor, why bother killing him? Nothing to inherit, might as well be friends.
• Head over heels in babies; indicative of M’s sly approach to norms, we never see legitimate kids, just his bastards
• Tim and Tutor’s strange homoerotic partnership; mutually compatible and happy, as the tutor is given a “dowry” as his fees; homosociality of school system
• Cf. Gynosodomy in Daileader: “a wise man will seek every hole, my tutor knows it;” tutor and Tim very close, always together, speaking in Latin, wife inducted into the relationship at the end
• Tim like Humphrey from Knight, good willed if not bright or useful
• Happily professes his non-normative stances
• After the Welsh dirty song: a vow to carry on with his usual sexual practices (Act V)
• Associations with Welsh women as very lascivious, seductive
• Tim articulates without any apparent sense of embarrassment unusual sexual practices that he apparently takes as normative
• Moll escapes through room of easement: allied with anality and waste products; made ill by Thames; degradation of an idealized Juliet figure
• Her MacGuffin romance with T Jr is undercut, resulting in a defamiliarization of heterosexual, patriarchal norms
• Rutter and McLuskie’s take invisibility of the boy beneath for granted; the absurdity of the play’s treatment of Moll lets the boy player wink out at us, at the audience

• WHO IS THE CHASTE MAID IN CHEAPSIDE?
• Event he Allwit baby is immediately sexualized; also the mutton baby; mutton vs lamb, double entendre
• No sexual innocence in this play; origin of title is proverbial; finding a chaste maid in Cheapside is like a needle in a haystack
• No one seems particularly interested in remaining chaste in the normal sense, anyway

• Anomalous christening scene, at the edges of what patriarchy surveys; 4 weeks after birth of a child, lie in bed, nurses and gossips; ease of labor
• Bleedthrough of biological facts: childbirth is a risk; women who survive it and thrive in this economy have won out; women recognize that their social utility is contingent upon their ease of reproduction
• first thing to wish for upon the birth of a daughter: she’ll make it, she’ll be a breeder
• losing track of social decorum in their celebration
• cf. the Kix’s doling of payment, a successive clearing of hurdles
• this is a thing that patriarchal culture HAS TO REWARD, like it or not
• Despite all of the men are disgusted they must serve the food, wait on the women, etc
• Dionysian aspect to the laying-in room
• Middleton mocks it, but celebrates it; they are not mocked in the way eg, Jonson mocks people
• Jones/Porn/Lent/The piece of flesh
• Porn for women
• The gossips torture the men, they know it, and they enjoy it
• Middleton is willing to show us that there is something outside of patriarchal culture; there are pleasures taken that are not as visible, not as contingent on cultural approval
• Community of Tim and Tutor and the gossips are all unusual dramatic subjects; they live outside the normal patriarchal structures

• The play as a game; as a set of arbitrary rules we expect it to follow or (in some cases) not follow
• The play shows demonstrates that it is crazy or impossible to follow all rules; everyone cheats
• Cuckoldry is an illegal move; yet it is also a winning move
• Early capitalism; investment; theater itself becomes a very lucrative enterprise, Cheapside is very commercial
• you have to be know when to be all in and when to cut your losses – Cf. Allwit, who knows when to withdraw; but Whorehound misjudges, never thinks of himself as an object of predation
• Allwit’s severing of Whorehound coincides with a false dignity, a fabulous moment of social performance, and W knows he’s been played
• Kix never seems to pick up on his bargain, the rules of the game he plays
• Many games referred to are card games, which imply: knowing rules; conceiving, developing and deploying strategy; opens the possibility to interpret rules in particular effort to reach a particular goal
• Cf. A Woman Killed with Kindness, where games are considered authentic, elucidating, and overall more objective; the games in Chaste Maid are more solidly categorized as performances
• A Chased Maid in Cheapside: people being pursued, caught; catching diseases, catching pregnant; predation and prey
• A much more sophisticated account of prostitution: there are prostitutes, and then there are WHOLESOME prostitutes; not the completely diseased
• Women have more going on behind the scenes than what men can know

• The bastard baby in the basket
• Lenten period, officers charged with policing the sale of meat are part of black market, paid off by butchers
• The statutes against meat on Lent can never be an absolute law: women are not denied meat when pregnant; pregnancy/birth itself results in a sort of movable feast
• Weird secularization of a kind of Christian story
• the connection of Christ and the lamb; stealing a lamb, partly baking it, shepherds are tricked, woman was pregnant, was allowed to have meat; shepherds have second thoughts about horrifically ugly fairy baby lamb
• I don’t know exactly what is going on here but it sounds incredible
• Customs of a didactic religious drama infuse this play, but they are hollowed out; Lent is only an unfair moment of want; no larger understanding of meditation on sins, etc
• Whorehound’s understanding like that of Everyman and the reckoning of his sins, impending damnation, but utterly divested of religious éclat
• Whorehound is not a redeemed creature; he is dropped, and his droppers come out ahead
• Middleton makes them part of a larger alienation and mockery of patriarchal structure; success implicit in treating them as rules of game to be messed with

• Reminder to skim over Daileader, Varnado, etc. and keep them in mind for the future

Logic is a Losing Game: Games, Rationality, (AND SEX!) in Chaste Maid

In many ways Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside plays with the standard logics of the early modern drama. There are, for instance, multiple plotlines (Allwits/Sir Walter; Moll/her Parents/Touchwood Jr; the Kixes/Touchwood Sr; Touchwood Sr./Country Wench/Promoters; Tim/Tutor/Welsh woman) whose complex overlappings can give the play a breathless, directionless feel. Hence, we imagine, this theatre’s sense that they needed to explain the roles of the characters ahead of time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8xGw-26c1Q

Characters also tend to haphazardly appear and disappear; think of the promoters, the gossips, the Puritans, and the suddenly-pivotal Susan.

Given such structural choices, we want to direct attention to Middleton’s portrayal of the relationship between rationality/linearity and games/chance in this play. On the latter point, Allwit’s motto that “there’s no gamester like a politic sinner, for whoe’er games, the box is sure a winner” implies a combination of logic (the rules of the game) and chance (gaming, risking, betting) (5.2.176). Allwit himself is a living contradiction—both wittol and all-wit—who wins the hand by kicking out Sir Walter at exactly the right moment. In a similar fashion, Tim uses logic and reason to marry contradictions. His transitive proof makes a fool a “rational creature” at the start of Act 4, and a whore an honest woman at the end of Act 5. Tim’s brag that “by logic I’ll prove anything” (4.1.35), along with his mother’s earlier suggestion that his “learning is a great witch” (1.1.61), suggests that logic and reason in the play are merged with, rather than polar opposites to, illogic and trickery.

We'll have more to say on these issues for Tuesday, after which we might broach any of the following questions:

• In what ways does Allwit’s motto prove true? Or, put another way, how does the “house” win in this play: completely, partially, or not at all? Is it the “patriarchal household” that wins out? Or is it a game of wits in which the winners have outsmarted the rest (or “beat the system”) and the losers are the true fools?
  
  
• What is Middleton’s aim in highlighting the “gaming” nature of city life, and its related reliance upon wobbly logic? Is the goal, as McLuskie suggests in her introduction, to highlight how characters can manipulate the odds/rules in their favor? Or is this a wider critique of the irrationality at the heart of a supposedly reasonable society? We might think here, too, of Paster’s suggestion that the play ultimately depicts a “resealing” of both leaky women and the contradictions of the ruling ideology.

• Finally, and on a somewhat unrelated note, what’s with all the sex?! Chaste Maid is, perhaps more than any other play we’ve read, driven by plots involving sex and procreation, or the lack thereof. The puns and bawdy jokes also come hand over fist. What are we to make of Middleton’s uncompromising raunchiness and the centrality of sex to the play?

Sex, Desire, Death: The Changeling, Day 2

For me, what has inspired my thinking about this play has been the persistent linkage of death with sex and desire. It would, perhaps, seem logical to locate the intersection of these three themes primarily in De Flores, at least to begin with. He is, as we have already discussed, a profoundly creepy figure in this play and one for whom desire often includes some aspect of violence or death: the image of him “thrust[ing]” his fingers into the “sockets” of Beatrice-Joanna’s gloves though he knows that “She had rather wear [his] pelt tanned in a pair / Of dancing shoes” than have him do so comes to mind, as well as his arousal as a result of murdering Alonzo (1.1.235-36, 234-35). Indeed, the central instances I would like to think of in light of this connection between sexuality, murder, and sexual appetite arise at least in part out of De Flores’s desire. But to locate the source of this intersection of death, sex, and desire in De Flores alone is, I think, too easy. And The Changeling is anything but easy.

We discussed the violent policing of female sexuality in our last class and, as I have been thinking through the play in more detail, it seems possible that the violence in protecting (or upholding) female chastity leads to or at least directly contributes to the conditions I have been describing, in which sex and desire are bound up with death. Certainly, violence arising from suspicions of unchaste behavior figures prominently in the play, not least in the martial challenges to friends and brothers who dare suspect Beatrice-Joanna of masking her true affections, but most obviously in Alsemero’s rather violent treatment and rejection of her in the moments before her death at De Flores’s hands.

As we have already discussed in class, Beatrice-Joanna’s recourse, in light of this environment of violent enforcement of chastity (at one point, she worries that if Alsemero suspects her sexual experience, he “cannot but in justice strangle me” 4.1.14), is remarkably circumscribed and, thus, her turn to murder as the only option for ridding herself of an unwanted lover and a potentially tale-spreading maid is made more comprehensible. This situation seems to arise directly out the strictly and violently enforced policy of female chastity and appropriately channeled desire.

In my presentation, I’d like to raise the issue of the persistent connection that the play draws between sex, desire, and death as a jumping off point that can go in any number of directions. My own interests are particularly in the intersections of these issues in Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores’s relationship and in the three crucial scenes around which the play seems to center – Alonzo’s murder, De Flores’s rape of Beatrice-Joanna, and the murder-suicide of the last scene, the first and last of which I see as acting as staged stand-ins for the rape of Beatrice-Joanna which cannot be performed (my own argument differs from, though it is indebted to, Christine Varnado’s reading of the murder of Alonzo, which I would be curious to hear from others about tomorrow in class).

Additionally, I’m curious about what the relationship between death and sex in this play does for the generative possibilities of the characters (or, potentially, of the environment and patriarchal system in which they live). Notably, future children are almost wholly absent from consideration in this play. The two mentions of them – by Tomazo when advising Alonzo against a wife whose affections have left him and by Beatrice-Joanna when inspecting the contents of Alsemero’s closet – are in a context in which the children would be completely undesirable: either half conceived by the man whom the wife actually loves (2.2.135-38) or the product of an unwanted union between Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores (4.1.26-27). Certainly, the final scene of the play, after Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores have died, is full of characters for whom generation seems at best unlikely and at worst impossible, with its only potential offspring arising from Isabella and Alibius’s troubled relationship. Though Alsemero offers his “son’s duty” to Vermandero and steps in to fill the child’s place that Beatrice-Joanna’s death has left open, one cannot help but to recognize the sterility and lack of tenability for future offspring that this resolution provides (5.3.216).

So, some questions that I would like for you to consider before tomorrow’s class:

Where do you see this intersection of death, sex, and desire being played out in this play? How might you connect up the violence associated with virginity with these themes?

What is the effect of having sex and death so crucially bound up with each other in this environment?

What about the resolution of the play and seeming removal of the troublesome “bad blood” that Beatrice-Joanna’s actions wrought in her family? What are we to make of this ending that offers no real hope for the future and no clear answer to the problem of the violence involved in protecting and upholding female chastity?

As I’m sure this blog post is making clear, these themes pervade the play and really any thoughts that you have about their effects on the play (or challenges or alternate readings to counter mine) are most welcome.

Notes from 10-16, The Changeling

Discussion Questions:

What did class think of the way that this play speaks about virginity? “beloved twin virginity” (p. 42)

What did you make of it in terms of the play as a whole or the acts that we looked at?

What about De Flores’s skin condition? How are we supposed to read ugliness in this play?

In what ways are Isabella and Beatrice-Joanna different? How does Isabella relate to Antonio (the changeling) and Franciscus? Is she the only person with any compassion in the subplot?

Beatrice-Joanna’s main transgression seems to be caprice. Does she really understand the implications of what she asks De Flores to do in murdering Alonzo?

Threads of Conversation:

The violence (and also speed) that characterizes how the play discusses the taking of virginity

- * This is pointed out to be a strange idea because of how women’s sexual appetite was conceived of in the period

Ugliness in this play

- *Not fixed in bodily characteristics (as in Richard III)

- *Entirely possible (and occasionally practiced) that De Flores may have no visible deformities, so that the discussions of his physical ugliness make little sense in performance

- *De Flores’s ugliness seems rather to be located in some kind of creepiness under the skin

- *More like he is a kind of bad omen

- *Dialogues in the period about ugliness as a sign of interior blockage, moral decreptitude, imbalance of humors

- *Yet there were still public figures who were deformed and adored, seems to be an ambivalence about this issue in public discourse

- *Problem of the ability to counterfeit madness or deformity in the subplot

Female Chastity

- *Problem of servants in the home, access to the women of the household

- *Isabella’s chastity is essentially lost as she is accosted by the different men of the household

- *No possible defense from them

- *Lack of female bodily autonomy in the period

De Flores’s Actions

- *No possibility of getting out of the voyeuristic position as audience members

- *Burk sees the play as upholding the patriarchal psychology underlying the contemporary rape laws

- *But the play also choreographs our separation from the charismatic villain to a horrified moment where he hauls her off to rape her

- *Audience has to feel sympathetic and implicated in her position

- *Beatrice-Joanna has no way out from her position

The Murder of Alonzo

- *Beatrice-Joanna not implicated in the murder until presented with Alonzo’s finger

- *She can actually be connected with the ring he gives her back

- *Finger links back with the seizure of virginity, maidenhead figured as an actual body part in its tremendous effects on body, family, marital prospects, economic, social, political implications

- *Conflation of violence and desire

- *Murder is an act of sexual aggression and pleasure

- *Promise of the reward that he imagines crowds out the vision of what he’s actually doing during A’s murder

- *Parody of the hand fasting in the marriage ceremony

- *Signifier brought back with the body still attached to it as a brutal severing with that tradition

- *This is a new world in which marriage traditions will be inverted

- *De Flores’s violent language of thrusting fingers into sockets

- *His imagined desire is a kind of manhandling of Beatrice-Joanna’s body that is violent/possessive/wearing her, way beyond the one-flesh model of marital unity

Beatrice-Joanna’s Psychology

- *fact that her desires contradict father’s will is the real problem; that is why we see her as capricious

- *love is impossible for a woman if it contradicts the patriarchy in which she lives; those family members control her ability to desire and love

- *Perhaps she understand what murder means, but she wishes to exercise control over it, where others wrest that control from her; her uncontrol of her own body gets unleashed on the bodies of others

- *Burks focuses on the idea that her deceit is two-fold because she doesn’t tell her father what she wants to do; would it matter? Wouldn’t really change anything about the course of her fate; extremes because she doesn’t have control over her own life

- *Beatrice can only discover that she has interiority by doing terrible things. Terrible that they can only discover that they can keep a secret is by going outside of the patriarchy.

- *Places that are female-female environments present opportunities for arithmetical thinking about women’s faithfulness can be projected

- *Beatrice-Joanna’s problem, that she is engaged to the wrong man, is a common problem in plays from this period – but her choices for how to improve her situation are remarkably circumscribed

- *Her choices are also potentially linked up with the romantic notions of either loving the man of choice or dying

- *Place of desire in the relationship between De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna’s - easy for us to find B and DF’s “romance” (not attractive) but captivating or charismatic

- *B and DF almost become a charismatic, romantic super-figure – become as “other” others; understand their romance as functional, as opposed to other idiot male figures who survive

- *problem arises from within, double othering which puts us back at the site of our own interiority; gaze of the protective male figures is always outward when it needs to be within and below

"Killing the Whole Man": The Body in "The Changeling"

Middleton and Rowley's “The Changeling” still registers today as a profoundly unsettling work. At least that was my reaction, not having read the play before. Beyond its renowned psychological realism/acuity and its intense depiction of a character that we would term a “stalker” nowadays, I believe what underpins the chilling nature of the play lies in its concerted attention toward foregrounding the body as a mutually constitutive, indivisible "whole": its language and proceedings disavow the easy alienation of body “parts,” lending a certain depth of horror (not felt in “Titus Andronicus” for instance) to the murderous acts it depicts.

Whereas in “Titus” alienated limbs and tears are thought of in terms of exchange-value within the dramaturgy, such “parts” in “The Changeling” always redound to the body as a whole, a discrete whole that is neither truly part of a larger social/affiliative body nor merely a sexual body. When Beatrice reacts in horror at the De Flores' presentation of Alonzo's amputated finger, he points out that “Why, is that more / Than killing the whole man?” She is faced with the reality of the body as a whole, a fact that counters a tendency amongst other works we've read where the fetishization of parts adds a euphemistic effect to violence. Moreover, the double inscription/conditioning of “blood” within the play as both an affiliative and sexual signifier has an overdetermining effect that renders its generative point, the body, as something incapable of being placed as either a part of a larger social body or a sexual object. Also, despite those who would argue otherwise, the seemingly purposive confusion regarding the signification of the “ugliness” of De Flores also concords with a disavowal of the fetishization/alienation of bodily particulars.

Because of this refusal of fetishization/alienation, the whole aspect of “changing” bodies, either through feigning madness/idiocy or cunning bedroom-tricks, becomes especially problematic. As such, I'd argue that the play has an immanent logic that bodies are nonfungible, or, rather, their exchange is always beset by grave difficulties. This refusal adds to the psychological horror of the work, propelling it beyond certain other Elizabethan/Jacobean bloodbaths in terms of the psychic cleavages it makes upon an audience.

SO, things to think about: How is the body constituted in “The Changeling?” What do we think of Alsemero's allusion toward the “holy purpose” that supposedly rests in Beatrice's body? Does the play trouble the notion of bodies as teleological entities (i.e. having an end, purpose, use)? How is the notion of virginity as an alienated bodily particular complicated by the play? What differentiates Beatrice and Isabella in terms of how they relate to bodies, whether their own or others? Is the body of a madman or an idiot constituted as intrinsically different from a “normal” person's?

I could keep going on with talking points but I won't. In short, I want to keep this discussion as open-ended as possible, so anything related to bodies, etc. presumably can fit into the convo. I've pretty much laid all my cards on the table here, so please feel free to critique or interrogate my position in class – many of you probably know this work far better than I do.

See you tomorrow!

NOTES FROM DAY TWO OF KNIGHT/NATALIE/OCT. 11th

Here's a pretty straightfoward account of our discussion surrounding Natalie's illuminating presentation on affection in “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”:

Natalie's presentation on “The Knight of the Burning Pestle” explored its representations of heterosexual marriage/coupling and the question of affection. What makes affection possible? More specifically, what makes affection possible in the theater? What does love/desire/marriage look like in the theater?

Using the Jasper/Luce coupling as a jumping-off point, Natalie posited that ideal marriage here functions as a collaborative partnership. She pointed to “yoke-fellow” as a particularly apt figure for this kind of partnership, in that it is “lateral, connected, and [ultimately] productive.” Natalie appended to her description that, in these dominant narratives of partnership, labor [might] have to be performed in order to mediate the desire of women (see p.106). So, Natalie asserts that a kind of “labor of love” in creating this narrative both prompts and sustains affection—it necessitates a plot both Jasper and Luce agree on. Theater/performance/playing mediates desire and allows for affective presentations. To wit: love = narrative; when put into play, narrative makes heterosexual love/marriage/partnership possible.

Tracey then brought into the discussion Rafe and Susan. This is a humorous cross-caste pairing yet we feel affection because, in playing the part of grocer, we can see how Rafe could really be Susan's husband. Emily noted how the pestle is essential to his named character and thus to the narrative.

Ellen then noted how, in this formulation, mutuality is raised as object of collective investment/identification. But then, who is the play for? We note how a sophisticated audience would laugh at evocations of Shakespeare for instance. What about Nell's constant interruptions? Do they alienate us or do we identify affection in ourselves in seeing her “genuineness”? Nell mostly commands the play's performance, a play mostly written/improvised for her. The willingness of Beaumont to make a play true for a humble woman rings of pleasantness; there's something affective/charming about her naivete/sincerity. But is there a different desire for an audience that isn't so “immune”?

More discussion of the labor of love as creative process (“breed soft smiling”) and, as Steven gestured towards, surrogacy of the play for George and Nell's lost child.

Then John brought up Old Merrythought as a confounding element to “affection": the terrible father ultimately "wins." As such, how much can we invest in this play? Natalie stated that if we conceive as MT as someone who figures “life as merry passage together” then his character still facilitates affection. But Michael reminded us “what do you say to a woman who had to marry 'the spirit of Saturnalia'"? Ellen remarked that he represents the “spirit of aphasia” who “loses track of human existence.” In any case, Ellen also reminded us, in turn, to think about boy actors. Then MT becomes absurd; his character slides into farce, with the performance undercutting its political implications.

Knight Of the Burning Pestle Day 2 Preview

Knight of the Burning Pestle Part II Preview: The Saga Continues

Sorry I posted the notes from last class so late, but hopefully I can make up for it by bringing a lot of what we talked about back and honing in on some particularly juicy aspects. I've got a whole lot of questions for you!
I’d specifically like to continue teasing out the threads discussed last Thursday that have to do with affect (in narrative and performance), and the desires, interests, and appetites of spectators and how they are negotiated in this play.

I’d like to work through these topics by focusing on how the play stages heterosexual relationships and desire—something Professor McKay indicated is perhaps much more complex or fraught in early modern drama than homosexual desire.
-How does the play stage heterosexual relationships, desire, marriage, love, and what it means to be a wife in ways we haven’t seen before?
-How might they be undermined by remnants or the continuation of older discourses/structures called forth in the play (romance genre, patrilineal inheritance, previous views of marriage, virginity, chastity, constancy etc.)?
-how does the odd “new” form of the play effect/undermine/create/mirror/bolster these representations of heterosexual relationships and desire?

More specifically, I’d like to think about the conditions of possibility for affection in Knight of the Burning Pestle.
-What are the conditions of possibility for affection in performance (of audience for characters)? What creates/conscripts affection and charisma here?
-What are the conditions of possibility for affection within the relationships staged in the play? Within marriage? Within an apprentice (Jasper) or lower-tier and higher status (Luce) romance?

Other Interests of Mine
-Is there a way to read this play as being invested in “touching” particular, private, and contingent desires with “small smiles” rather than more symptomatic or didactic public desires for irony, satire, “in an invective way”? (Beaumont, Prologue) If so, how?

-Questions of performance and staging are always on my mind, most specifically for this play, how to play Rafe, a character whose prowess as an actor is constantly emphasized; does this indeed reveal the body beneath and point to virtuosity in performance, or would it be more effective considering his quixotic essence to play him against such indications of prowess?

-How also to deal with the many places in the play where the secret “tricks” of actors and the conditions for effective performance are given away and exposed to the audience, and what exactly does that do?

NOTES FROM DAY ONE OF KNIGHT/MARA/OCT. 6th

Mara challenged us to think about the “bad romances” in Knight of the Burning Pestle, seeing the woman as commodity as a through-line from the old system of patrilineal inheritance to the new-market and capital based system emerging in the period, and how the play stages an illicit desire to see this “property” of woman carried off.
-The Caste to Class shift
-Courtesy
-the (ridiculous) exigencies of knighthood
-the theatre of the courtship ritual
-how virginity is refreshed by rape, the audience’s illicit desire to see rape (the carrying away of a woman/sexual violation) as a bad romance here made ok by Luce’s “asking for it”
-the assumption that women in the period would like to read these rapey narratives

We then discussed the oft-asked question of why the play flopped, bringing in our own experiences of the play, whether or not we found it funny, engaging, confusing, boring, etc.
-was the irony not pointed enough, as Witmore pointed out?
-too many layers?
-too offensive, did people not appreciate this takedown of the market class, or of the gallants, or even of the romance genre?
-the critique of audience appetites inherent in the play (George and Nell’s desires act as the focus, the lens through which the plays are mediated and interpreted)
-did audiences find themselves too distanced, that they weren’t being conscripted enough, but rather were being replaced?
-comparisons to other meta-theatrical moments in this period, especially Midsummer Night’s Dream and the difference of that sophisticated audience and their harsh critique of the earnest work of the players, and Shakespeare’s satire of that audience
-was it like going to see a certain genre of movie not getting expectations met?
-does it simply take too long to understand the bodies on stage?
-readerly pleasure vs. theatre flop

Affect and Audience in Knight
-George and Nell as adorable, affectionate, and as instilling affection
-possible to read all characters as funny, compelling, engaging
-idealized representation of apprentice/master relationship
-the way Nell invites us into her home to drink after the play
-Nell can also be read as stupid; as unruly subversive woman; as bad spectator who critiques bad spectatorship (the smoking gallants)

Witmore’s Article
-Knight doesn’t work as a boy’s play because the kind of irony normally available through bodies of boys was changed, even lost
- Bodies of actors aren’t left to bleed through, somatically impact the audience
- Bodily excess, actor’s body beneath/ Rudder’s claim- how readily did e.m. audience take boys for women? Absolutely!
-Nell herself is a boy pointing out boys’ beautiful bodies, they are aging out of boys company roles
-Middle aged drag-has to pull off trade class and woman, if its too draggy might be reason why play flopped

Knight in Performance
- May have taxed the companies too much, each character has tremendous comic potential
-Excess: too much demanded of characters, of actors
-perhaps too much to process, to grab onto, hard to read emphasis and right affect
-comparison to onstage competition between Lavinia and Titus
-isn’t staged often, could we stage it today?

Identification and Audience Appetites
-George and Nell misidentify allegiances: they favor Humphrey who has money and status but nothing else, instead of Jasper, who is an apprentice like their own Rafe
-Beaumont critiquing audiences’ desires as that which go against their own interests
-Nell doesn’t feel compassion for Luce as woman but sees her as daughter, as property

Final notes
-Professor McKay wants to discuss Knight in relation to two-eyed ness of Titus
-She would also like to take account of all the characters
-the complex tapestry of negotiating interest, appetite, and desire of spectators

notes from 4 October

TITUS ANDRONICUS, DAY II

I. Tracey presents:
1. Definitions: consume, revulsion
2. Interest derived from A Woman Killed with Kindness and its preoccupation with gastronomic consumption
3. How does revulsion in Titus implicate readers as we “consume” the play, etc.?
1. Of interest: “banquet” and “fly” scenes
2. Parallels drawn between reading and eating; (and, of course, Lavinia acquires semiotic meaning after she is consumed by the Goths; the raped Lavinia can only be read when she 'consumes' the staff)
3. So how are readers expected to react?
1. “Terrible” punning and word play: banquet
1. Hand puns: “awful” and “heartbreaking”
2. Language made literal on the stage (but is this particular to Titus, or a quality of performed script in general?)
2. Reception history

II. Discussion
1. “Actually seeing” a performance in which players knowledge the audience's presence (versus “just reading?”); spectatorial contract
2. Text-on-stage: Lavinia's writing; Philomela fable; messages to the gods
1. Titus as storyteller
2. Marcus's & Lucius's (elder) recapitulate the action at the end; inadequately?
1. Marcus inappropriately re-frames everything he encounters by a classical story (Dido, Philomela); Tamora's allusions are spot on (is that part of why she must be destroyed by her fellow wild beasts?)
3. Obscenity
1. Is this counterproductive? Does such obscenity as Titus wants cause us to “turn away,” or “eject us?”
2. Taymor
1. Asides: Tamora, Aaron, The Boy who interpolates the audience at first, and, afterwards, Aaron does this, owing to his ob-scene position.
1. Nested narratives, multiple points of entry, multiple sites for identification.
1. Revulsion as a didactic tool, asking the audience to negatively identify?
2. Does revenge make otherwise revolting violence palatable?
4. Decorum and indecorum
1. “Pleasurability for undergraduates”
1. Lifts dramatic resonance out of inaccessible, high culture and establishes the revolting―the indecorous―as the heart of the classical tradition
1. “Recirculating these stories without understanding what they do”
2. The Senecan tradition smacks of Saturnalian cannibalism
3. “Gothically” wounded Christs from early Catholicism
2. “Centuries-long 'anxieties of influence'”
3. Shakespeare's over-the-top, gut-wrenching violence anticipates Brecht's frustration with masturbatory spectatorship?
5. Consumption
1. Aaron in perpetual consumption by the Earth
1. Who is the only father who does not commit infantacide
1. How do we interpret this with Aaron's presentation as a Machiavellian figure? “Super-exceptional” masculinity, in both instances.
1. However, Aaron will teach his child to “raise a camp” i.e. to recapitulate Romanesque violence and martial culture―which counters a sympathetic , or subversive, reading of Aaron
2. Baby as Empress's child; as Aaron's child (and substitute for the sovereignty monopolized by Tamora?)
2. The Pie, followed by Lavinia, Tamora, Saturnine, and Titus for desert
1. Neroic orgy―the most honest embodiment of the classical tradition?
6. Lavinia
1. Neither is she available for valorization because of Tamora harangue
2. Discretion: Lavinia's fair, interpretable body, Aaron's dark, opaque body (no “alehouse-painted sign”)
7. Drama and accessibility
1. Isn't the death of everyone of account alienating (if only within the context of the spectatorial contract)?
2. Why is the terrible sea omitted from Taymor's adaptation?
3. Lavinia and the inaccessibility of trauma to non-victims/survivors, coupled with her high visibility: she is “in total tension with the action”
4. Staging

Titus Andronicus Presentation Teaser

For my presentation tomorrow, I would like to focus on the issues surrounding revulsion and consumption in both the text and performance of Titus Andronicus. In Titus, “consuming sorrow” (3.1.61) is transformed into literal consumption when Titus feeds Tamora “son pie.” What is striking to me about this last scene is the way that revenge in Titus is served hot to both Tamora and to the audience, which makes me wonder if there is a parallel between Titus’ gruesome pasties and Shakespeare’s violent play. After all, both the pie and the play are built from the bodies of actors. Like Tamora in 5.3, as readers and spectators we are merely the captive and silent audience of Titus/Shakespeare, being served up a bloody meal. In his introduction to the latest Arden edition of Titus, Jonathan Bate argues “Titus is an unusual dramatist in that he knocks up a pie rather than a curtain; he plays the cook, not the author and the actor” (23). But, what really makes the author and the cook different, particularly in a play like Titus that makes extravagant use of so many revenge tragedy ingredients? The stranger aspect of Shakespeare/Titus as chef is not the metaphor itself, but, rather, that Shakespeare and Titus have cooked up a play that is difficult to swallow. How does revulsion in Titus make us aware of our own consumption as readers and as spectators?

And so, in preparation for our class discussion tomorrow, some topics and scenes to consider are as follows:

• Aebischer’s discussion of obscenity: “Shakespeare thrusts obscenity upon readers, spectators and characters alike. The raped Lavinia is ob-scene, literally ‘off, or to one side of the stage’, in that her mangled, leaking, open body forces into our view ‘that which is just beyond representation’” (Aebischer 29-30).
• The OED definitions of revulsion http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/164997?p=emailAGIKmGq8CtJiY&d=164997; and consume http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/39973?p=emailAGF6uxPhRtRzA&d=39973.
• The two banqueting scenes (3.2 and 5.3).
• The image I have posted from Xavier Leret's 2001-2 production (described in detail in Aebischer's piece from page 49-52).
  

Knight of the Burning Pestle: Bad Romance?

Of course it is--Beaumont's presentation of theater and theatergoing is positively scathing, as Whitmore tells us. On Thursday, however, I am going to ask us to consider "romance" a little more conventionally, as a threshold between desire and performance as it relates to caste, class, and "what women want." I've linked to Gaga's "Bad Romance" to get us thinking about how particularly bad romances like the one fantasized in the video, and the one fantasized by Luce (and, by implication, Nell) in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, relate to our desire for entertainment. Enjoy!