Notes for Masque of Blackness Class Conversation

Ellen: On Adelman’s article: a highly eccentric reading, akin to Wilson’s “insane!” crypto-Catholic reading of Shakespeare; I like both of them for all their boldness
-Will Stockton’s work demonstrates the openness of queer theory as a kind of problematic; queer theory might be akin to performance studies, as both are bold moves that go beyond standard approaches to bourgeoisie theatre; but there have recently been critiques of Schechner and others in performance studies for their heteronormative language; there may be a friction between queer studies and performative studies at play here that needs more investigation
-Will as a helpful and pragmatic resource, willing to respond to queries about useful texts; keep an eye on him, he is always supportive of young scholars

Savannah’s Presentation on Jonson’s Masque of Blackness

Savannah: We see several new phenomena in the masque that we haven’t seen before, including the biological female body in performance and royalty on stage
-The masque’s formal qualities refuse to privilege the written word over the spectacle; Jonson’s text is certainly no more valuable than Jones’s set and costume design; and accordingly we need to look at the visual performance and physicality of the Masque of Blackness; the Masque, for instance, probably cost at least 3,000 £s (380,000 £s in today’s terms) for costume and set design; as opposed to around 40 £s for Jonson’s tex
-This focus on the visual allowed the court to bask in its own fabulousness
-Jonson’s text can be seen as trying to maintain certain aspects of the performance as spectacle; he uses an excessive language to try to capture what cannot be captured: the original performance itself. Thus Jonson tries to describe the movements in the play’s opening and its moving scenery even as Jonson admits that his text cannot capture the ephemeral. We might consider why Jonson tries to write the a text that cannot contain the performance.
-The text imagines blackness as something aesthetic, beautiful; Jonson showcases the ladies’ blackness and uses the glamour of the scene to emphasize their blackness. This focus on the aesthetic juxtaposes with Andrea’s argument that blackness is a political tool for the Queen

-Questions:

1. How do we compare the blackened female body in the masque with our past discussions of the female body, or more specifically the male body dressed as a woman on stage?

2. Can we use MacKendrick’s concepts of absence and presence in language and dance to think about the absence and presence of the performance in Jonson’s the printed text?

Tracey: I like your reading of blackness as glamour, and as an aesthetic device that exceeds the text

Savannah: I saw Andrea as helpful, but I don’t think she addresses the concept of blackness as an aesthetic

Tracey: I agree, Andrea doesn’t talk about why the queen would have wanted to be black in the first place

Ellen: Andrea is certainly useful because she puts history back into the spectacle and shows the spectacle as needing a historic/contextualized reading. Certain aspects of her argument are convincing, especially her backdrop of blackness as a performative indulgence, but the link to Roth (women as tainted as black) that actually comes later historically is a tricky move for Andrea to make. She is right to say women’s access to print is tenuous, but simply linking Queen as author to the masque is tenuous. There is also something like Aebischer here in Andrea’s desire to see the Queen as simultaneously proto-feminist and racist, for all the anachronism of those terms. Using these terms isn’t so problematic, maybe, but Andrea should be more aware/overt of the anachronism of her terminology.
-Really, what Andrea does help us realize is that a spectacle like the Masque is not easy to understand, or to teach. To try and reclaim the performance that is inevitably lost requires as many historical accounts of it as we can take hold of. Such records also importantly remind us that Jonson’s record is not complete or univocal.
-I love Jonson’s clear tension with Jones, who is crowding out his textual virtuosity with imagery and spectacle. McDermott helpfully reminds us, too, that certain of Jonson’s arcane textual details could not have been read intelligibly during the performance itself (e.g. the symbols on the women’s fans)

Mandy: the Queen is 6 months pregnant while the masque occurred; did you, Savannah, find anything about this?

Savannah: I considered it, for sure, but it’s a hard detail to reckon with.

John: In line with the clip from The Tudors, it seems like the dance may have taken much more of the time of the masque that any of Jonson’s text. The dance may also have been a time when more “stuff” happened, women and men touching, exchanging glances; more interesting contacts may have been made here than during the text of the masque.

Savannah: The dance is under-described by Jonson, and I think it’s important to consider what Jonson does and doesn’t present. The dance gets very minimal textual attention.

Natalie: I agree, especially given that Jonson sassily writes off the dance and music.

Ellen: The dance is made significant only because of the royalty of the people dancing. We should consider the possibility that there may have been some awful dancing. I agree that there is a tension between the deferential language of Jonson and the event itself. A masque is an event that makes possible transactions that would not normally be able to occur in the open. Notice the Russian-doll nature of the masque in The Tudors where Henry meets Anne Boleyn, which itself is reference in another masque [NB: this may be wrong, I got a little lost here]. The dance and the masque more broadly are loaded moments, overloaded with juicy historical insiderism. There would have been a lot going on beneath the ostensible play action. Masques operate along insider knowledge, and so to read masques alongside plays or poems is both a democratic but also a divisive, problematic move, as the insider knowledge is essential for understanding masques to a certain degree.

Natalie: Unlike Shakespeare’s works, is it true that the masque can be brought back to life more easily?

Ellen: The theatre is always based upon both a loss and nod to futurity. The masque is hard to recreate because it is so expensive. Plus after the masque the court folks would tear the sets apart to take home souvenirs, which is a kind of nihilistic kind of move in which you literally consume the event. This highlights the masque’s ephemerality. And yet songs, bits and pieces of the masque could come back in parlor theatre. Until the Victorian period, you had to parlor theatre the thing, and thus preservation was based on reenactment in often stripped down circumstance. Even house of moderate wealth would stage pageants during holiday seasons.

Natalie: How might that relate to how blackness is talked about as everlasting, outside of death in the masque? This repeatable, on-going blackness is counterpoised to the ephemerality of the performance itself, I think.

Ellen: Supposedly this play is in honor of James’s enlightening gaze, which is at an odd juxtaposition to the discussion of eternal blackness. What’s weird is that this feels a lot like how Elizabeth was described in masques, and so maybe effeminizes James in some way.
-We are constantly trying to read the masque through multiple different lenses: local court politics, national politics, gender/sex politics, the politics of the theatre world. For me, the masque is an opportunity to capitulate to a state of non-thinking: the moment of reception is one that cannot be cognitively full and loaded in the way we think a play might be. The narrative is so flimsy an excuse for what is going on visually that interpreting it is in some way not conducive to investigative scholarship. Precisely because there are so many multiple readings at play at the same time, it is not possible to shore up a single reading. Given the multiple things going on, the multiple identities at play, one single reading can’t explain everything. Attempting to do so is at best a headache, at worst somewhat absurd.

Tracey: Yes, Oceanus is blue, it’s a little ridiculous

Michael: We should remember that slaves from northern Africa were called “bluemen” by Vikings

Tracey: Of course; but how do we take race really seriously in this text when we have a character who is blue? In the same vein, the mer-women are supposedly white?

Ellen: Andrea notes that race and color/hue are not commensurate during James’s reign. Bovilsky pointed this out too. Racialized thinking is opearting through a humoral paradigm that doesn’t cohere to our contemporary understanding of race as bodily and as readable through skin color. Color and hue have a robust history in plays and elsewhere, but they don’t support the modern notions of race. For example, Tamora in Titus is super-white and is opposed to not just Aaron’s blackness but also to Lavinia’s “normal” whiteness. Color was mapped geographically on the earth at the time (the farther north, the whiter you were assumed to be). Brownness/blackness can also have pleasurable connotations: it’s fun to put on different makeup, to wear short dresses.
-I think we should embrace a kind of nonsense at play in the masque; the Masque of Blackness certainly defers a sense of normativity until next year. It ends on an inchoate note where black can remain as beauty, and so everything that the play seems to support as a sensible narrative reading is deliberately put off. Ultimately nothing coheres. As a result, teaching masques can make you look like an ass to a certain degree because they don’t cohere to sensible readings and are easily troubled. The playtext itself is flimsy, even stupid, and Jonson overtly embraces the whimsy of the play.

Michael: There is a weird metonymic quality to Jonson’s stage directions. He doesn’t give enough specificity, and this too gives the play a nonsense quality. His description of the moon appearing is a bit fantastical and purposefully non-disclosive.

Ellen: I agree; this isn’t the text for a play, his are not stage directions. Jonson is unwilling to fully describe it, and he doesn’t bring up all the other materials/ideas/responses that other texts bring up. For instance, the claim that one maid “lost her honesty” is totally opaque.
-Remember that this is an early masque in James’s reign and so it must allegorize all of his institutions and reinforce patriarchal norms. Yet James’s performance of regality always seem to fail a bit, on stage and off. James really supports the theatre during his reign, but the theatre’s relation to James is complex at best. Theatrical works repeatedly undo him (A Game of Chess, for instance), and the Masque interestingly pokes fun of the “numskully nature” of tying the significance of patriarchal authority to a flimsy performance
-Savannah is right to point us to MacKendrick and to highlight the masque’s operatic nature, as MacKendrick points us towards gaps in the masque’s understandability

Tracey: Yes, the scene in The Tudors seems childish at points and even somewhat silly with Sir Thomas More describing the play to the Spanish ambassador. It is weirdly sexual as well

Ellen: Varnado is useful for reminding us that we don’t see the sex that early moderns saw. The masque may have allowed for erotic connections that otherwise would have been impossible.
-Also, what could people have possibly actually heard of the speeches, whether during the masque or during city parades? You could see women in scanty attire, some fireworks, but the speeches were probably inaudible, and overall performances like the parade can be a kind of boring and a non-meaningful act. Perhaps, then, the pleasure of the masque is actually its detachment from narrative. We need not think through all the meanings and connections that plays demand if us. The masque is thus perhaps best seen as a purely pleasurable, bodily experience.

Steven: On page 101, there is an important moment of dialogue involving a relationship between the imprintable and the unimprintable/ephemeral. The women’s dance here is turning into writing, the black-faced ladies are dancing around like black inked words on a page, but they are constantly swirling and not cohering to a logic. Is there a tradition of this link between dance and logic?

Ellen: Not that I can think of, though print culture is certainly developing at this time, and in first editions there are often huge numbers of errata. Thus texts can come across as a source of confusion rather than stable meaning given the looseness of typesetting at this period. The public is encountering this phenomenon for the first time, and it might have been in the air. Certainly people like Jonson would have been aware of the danger of incoherence in printing, as Jonson heavily oversaw the printing of his texts.
-Savannah makes an interesting point that Jonson might have tried to capture the ephemeral nature of the performance; but Jonson may also have cherry-picked the parts of the performance he wanted to keep. He highlights, for instance, the decision to use black make-up as the Queen’s, and one wonders whether there might be other sly insinuations of Jonson’s own take on the performance itself in his recording of the text. Jonson is taking liberties that bring out the irretrievability of the performance, which MacKendrick definitely emphasizes.

Tracey: I wonder who would have played Niger and Oceanius? Would they have been professional actors, or might someone have bungled the poetry?

Ellen: Jonson probably printed the masque precisely because there were problems with the performance itself: lines may have been bungled or too quiet, and most importantly the audience’s attention was probably on the set, the scenery, and the action rather than the speakers’ words. McDermott reminds us, too, that the revels part of the performance would have kept the audience anxiously waiting for their cue; this too might have been a distracting anxiety, along with the fear that the black body paint might spoil your good outfit. This interaction between audience and players happens to some degree in the public playhouse (e.g. clowning traditions, actors communicating with audience), but its occurrence in the masques might have been more fraught: the audience would have been anxious as to when they were supposed to come into the play, and so would have been attendant to their own performances rather than the masque itself. Jonson’s text assumes an un-implicated spectator sitting apart from the masque, which was not the case. Ironically Jonson loves the form of drama but he does not love the medium given all its potential distractions, which is doubly interesting given that he is so closely affiliated with masques.
-One thing we don’t know is what the dance would have looked like, how conventional it would have been. There would probably have been anxiety about dancing properly, but dance can be a pleasurable point as well, and certainly a point of overlap between performance and the everyday life. Later masques become more driven by narrative and more constrained b decorum; but with this Masque things would have been loser, more risky, and the dance is for that reason both quite important and particularly hard to recover.

Lucy’s Presentation on The Duchess of Malfi:

Lucy began with Ferdinand’s wrestling match in Act V, scene 2 and compared it to Disney’s Peter Pan and his rebellious shadow, as he attempts to reattach it to avoid identity splitting, as well as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, who stabs his painting. The play prefigures modern portrayals of disassociative identity. Ferdinand disassociates the self from his physical body in viewing himself as a man transformed into a wolf. A frightened double self is evident in the invisible creature that the audience witnesses the absence of, pointing to the theme of portrayal of the body in strange scientific and mathematical terms and a peculiarly doubled entity watching and disassociated from itself. The body, real or imagined, thus becomes a piece of art fashioned in human form. This occurs similarly with the Cardinal in the last act as well as with the Duchess, who is subject to multiple artistic renderings. Additionally, Ferdinand imagines his sister as another piece of himself, or a projection of himself, and cannot disassociate himself from her persona. This reflects catholic understandings of the self as bound up with materialist tradition idealized in the relic. Yet the Duchess defies ceremony and the relic, and perhaps she represents feminine identity as idolatrous in nature.

Questions: Considering that we as the audience are made doubles, voyeuristically watching, what’s the (meta)significance of the wax figures? Does the play incite us to affect or perhaps political action? Why is the artistic space contrasted with image of dog kennel? Why do the women need to be strangled by two executioners? What would this look like in performance?

Connection to Hotel: the close ups on characters faces highlight the importance of facial features and transformation in the play.

Michael—Why do we see Cariola die at all? What’s being bought there dramatically?

Emily—There’s something erotic and double about Cariola, queer and not rejection of heterosexual, made obvious by bringing her back on in the execution. She’s witness to all, and it’d be strange if there wasn’t a moment of seeing, of eye contact with her and the Duchess. Additionally, the play involves language that points to doubling—Ferdinand asserts he and the Duchess are twins, increasing the link between doubleness and eroticism.

Tracey—There’s tension throughout the play in terms of actual embodiment of characters. In the difference between theater and the dog kennel, Webster privileges the dynamic nature of theater over static forms of art like relics. The body is consumed and consuming. The play navigates difference between constituting someone as a signifier and the actual physical form of person.

Ellen—Stability of Ferdinand’s diagnosis, recognize the doctor as quack, no reason to trust. Ferdinand conforms to the diagnosis out of convenience, to put a name to his symptoms that perhaps cannot be explained. This is problematic because it cannot be explained--eruption of absurdity, turns into wolf a manifestation of absurdity, points to the meaninglessness of Act V.

John—The absurd/obscene in hotel points to the play’s absurdity: the body doubles, theatrical action doubles, two seduction scenes, multiple going behind curtains, is perhaps all designed to get us to affectively respond. The play feels authentic and committed, but, at same time, all this nonsense is hard to place.

Ellen—An unspooling that doesn’t work with logic points to structural, willful messiness in the play. Representationality in art versus in one’s authentic biological nature – play between representation as more potent than the biological body, more wounding than what can happen in real life. The play doesn’t want to side with either the dialectics we can set up.

Ellen— the damned and the blessed

Tracey—What’s the play saying about animality?

Natalie— Page 172, abortive hedgehog face? What’s this image doing in this play?

Ellen—patent absurdity to figure, grotesque, misogynistic. The play pushes at our desire to feel stable through an affective path of identification—deliberately complicates.

Emily—The Duchess imposes order. After her death, the order of narrative breaks down. Move from brief instances of language to Ferdinand actually thinking he’s a wolf.

Steven—How do we take the absurdity? Echo scene, should we choose whether it’s funny or serious? No. What’s more painful than absurdity is the sense that nothing means anything. A mixture of silliness, comedy, and pain seems tied into repetition.

Marx-History appears first as tragedy then as farce; having repeated it, you can’t get same meaning

Ellen—Do we read the echo scene as either profoundly tragic or as comic?

Ellen—The supernatural is an un-denoted phenomenon that runs throughout the play, as theatrical phenomenon requiring decision as to what is and is not there. The play ventriloquizes King Lear, like lines around notion of “look there, look there” to wider audience. In Lear and this play, you have to reclaim a sense of undecidedness that occurs in that moment, creating a sense.

Ellen—The play was criticized for Act V, and some productions cut it out because the tragic figure dies before end (not within theater conventions). The play messes with traumatic structure by not letting the audience anticipate or prejudge where it’s going. The last act is brilliant dramaturgy that keeps the audience doing the imaginative work that keeps theater alive. The play works in reverse of the tragic drama to alienate the audience in terms of dramatic expectation.

Masque of Blackness

We've been discussing tensions between written and performed texts in terms of what different audiences experience, what we as contemporary readers envision, and how a play may call attention to the body in performance. The masque as a form magnifies the interplay between text and performance in that the written text relies on descriptions of the aesthetic quality of the ephemeral. Given this reliance, I’d like to attempt to account for what we cannot account for, what we as readers cannot see but must imagine: the visual aesthetic and physicality of The Masque of Blackness.

As the content of The Masque of Blackness questions patriarchal and English notions of beauty, Jonson's explanatory text obsesses over the ornate, beautiful qualities of the masque in performance. Indeed, we as readers get nearly as much attempt at visual reconstruction as textual representation of the masque. Of course, the form of this type of performance demanded such attention to style; as Ingram notes, “some spectators might have come to see [Inigo] Jones’s spectacle as much as to hear Jonson’s verse, a fact that printed texts can obscure” (184). Yet Jonson's text appears as an attempt to resist loss of the quality of the performance as spectacle, an effort to preserve what cannot be contained within the form of written text. In doing so, it seems he creates an excess of language, one which I will consider as related to the presence/absence (in MacKendrick's sense) of the original performance within the text and the excessive quality of the form of the masque itself. And to provide you with a masque in performance (however anachronistically), I present The Tutors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tCUp6-FfXM&feature=related&noredirect=1

Discussion on Friday, 11/11

Discussion on 11/11

Prof. MacKay:

Binocularity: there is a commoner denotation of perspective, concerning the denuded woman. See Mulvey as framework (scopophilia).

Maus and Ocularity

You have to be able to conjure up the science of the eye in Early Modern Drama because in the Renaissance they believed that the eye beamed images of ourselves onto others which led to fears of spectatorship

Think about Galileo and the camera obscura that was invented around this time suggesting that eyes don’t shoot beams.

(Intra-/extra-missive) materiality of seeing and the notion of making an impression and conspicuously so.

The gaze is a literally present and affectively understood phenomenon

Webster is very into these ideas.

The White Devil and Virginius/Virginia story provides an interesting link with Titus and the Lavinia story.

Maus. Jealousy is like a perspective, distorting the gaze.

Work on defrocking witchcraft trials and exposing the falsity of the trials, which was an assumed monolithic discourse, but not so.

Inigo Jones-Invented the notion of theater design. Put on extravagant masque performances, venues for extreme display. He infuriated Jonson.

For ideas perspective, it is important to look to Schneider.

The notion of sex worker as theater artist and that sex is always a type of theater work. There is a long tradition of thinking anti-structurally about the theater and the presentation of sexuality, and also about the connections between theater and theology.

History of sex work: there is a sort of innocence or blindness that has been read back on it.

All the terms in the Schneider’s work are historically specific and are connected to the 1980s.

Mandy’s Presentation

Maus is very pertinent to The Duchess of Malfi, and she is going to read Ferdinand as cuckold.

Ferdinand says “I have a suit to you” and there are many definitions of suit, which she goes over from the OED, and it seems as though he is asking for his sister’s hand in marriage.

Significance of Bosola’s pernetration into the Duchess’s household

“be-be speak a husband”-A Freudian slip by Ferdinand

There is an obsessive preoccupation with her body. He thinks of himself as her husband.

He wants ocular proof like a jealous husband.

The employment of the pregnancy test is used very much like the virginity test in The Changeling.

Through Bosola’s spying eyes, he acts like the jealous husband. He is the hidden space where Ferdinand and the Duchess overhear each other and work out their connection.

Ferdinand plays an actual role in punishing his wife like the jealous male punishes the beloved.

Images of self-fragmentation (or fragmenting the Duchess): “hewed her into pieces.”

The Duchess and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. Both of these women are supposed to be visibly pregnant. Are there illegible bodies in this play? Pregnant body? Wax Body?

The Duchess is a boy actor playing a duchess playing a pregnant woman pretending not to be pregnant.

Speaks of the Voyeuristic gaze.

Mara: questions whether voyeuristic gaze means that the spectator also desires to watch the violence.

Is Bosola an extension or a personification of the gaze?

Mandy:

Ferdinand has everyone do things for him. There is a doubling of male characters.

Tracy:

Suggests that there is a triple pun in Ferdinand’s not: “I want his head in the business, pointing to homoeroticism.

Prof. MacKay:

There is an erotic canabalistic moment of eating and renewing and imagining Antonio’s body and the Duchess. Through the figures’ friction/frission we are made aware of the tension between sexuality and violence.

The Duchess has superior knowledge of someone’s performance at all times and is in control of the feminine space within the patriarchal order.

There is a sense that anything productive has to be invisible.

There is a disconnect in the way that the Duchess is viewed and the way she views herself.

She is very much a fighting woman—referring to herself as a prince.

Natalie:

In life the Duchess claims control, saying even if you kill me, you are not going to win.

Antonio won’t meet her gaze, and Ferdinand knows enough not to look at her.

Prof. MacKay:

What she looks like is unclear, except what she is like.

She is portrayed as a mother, wife, dowager, and is a very unstable protagonist. Everytime someone addresses her, she rebuffs their perception. They suggest a symbol of what she is, but not her actual self.

Duchess is aware that she cannot be a stable thing. Consider I.ii.

People only enter into the visible field retroactively. The language of recognition lags substantially behind.

What we can see and what can be know are very different and overt.

This play is very grounded in the body and the abstract simultaneously. Ferdonand—the erotic power that is wielded over him by the Duchess sounds like Macbeth and the witches.

What does the Duchess’s body mean? What does it mean to look at her and not look at her?

John:

Thinking about “odious comparisons” The ridiculous comparisons at the end of Act III are hard to work with, because there is a surfeit of examples.

The pilgrimage scene is very difficult to stage. The pilgrims are all in dumbshow and all come to the conclusion that the Cardinal is too hard on his sister.

Prof. MacKay:

This is linked to defrocked faith and anti-idolatrous ideology.

The truth values of this play are more shadowed than any other play that one can think of in this period.

Bosola is the court gaul and the most emblematic of dishonesty. We seek truth from him, but we can’t really trust anything he says.

Bosola is much like Iago. Compare him to “honest Iago.” Consider the involvement of Bosola who is not the villain, but in fact a victim.

Natalie:

This play is unlike Richard II and King Lear in the way that these two figures make central, fatal mistakes. The Duchess does not do this. In fact, she doesn’t make any decisions, and is recognized as a slut. It is all about reputation.

Prof. MacKay

The last act:

The salmon and the dogfish. Very strange parable. Orthodox moral has extraordinary reach. What are we worth? What do we mean until we are consumed?

Thinking about her pregnancy/fate: Primary definition of “fat” in the period was actually “fattened”—It is like she is fattened for slaughter.

Natalie:

The audience feels an individual identification with her.

This is not sententious tragedy. It refuses to be.

Forces theater into co-creation existence because of its relative subjectivity and is equally undefined and complex. She soliloquizes to us directly.

Prof. Mackay:

You tend to lose students to this play. Lost two students already, one got into it and was lost for two years.

The Duchess of Malfi Part Two: The Double Self

In Act V, Scene ii of The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand engages in a wrestling match with his shadow and attempts to strangle the apparition, crying “I will throttle it,” even as Malateste pitifully remarks, “Oh, my lord, you are angry with nothing!” (V.ii.33-34). In this scene, having already descended into his madness diagnosed as “lycanthropia,” Ferdinand fractures his self and dissociates his physical body from the part unable to reach light; he imagines a struggle with the darker aspect of his person as a means of identifying and coping with the internal beast who ordered the strangulation of his sister. No longer recognizing himself as man, but as man transformed to wolf or wolfman, he creates an externalized out-of-body identity, and surveys the perceptible shadowy figure in the shape of a man—or possibly wolf—as a frightening double self to be captured and used as a “bribe” (as if it were another damned soul) in “Hell” (V.ii.37). This “nothing” self –the invisible creature that the audience witnesses the absence of within this one-sided stagefight—is actually given much significance in a play largely concerned with the double nature of the present character body and its imagined figural body as joint maps of character integrity. The shadowy absence points to the larger theme of the portrayal of the body not only in strange scientific and mathematical terms, but also as a peculiarly doubled entity, constantly watching and dissociated from itself in this play.

The imagined double body is either pictured as a type of dissociative identity such as in the case of Ferdinand and the Cardinal or as a real or imagined piece of art fashioned in human form to act as an imagined self. Ferdinand and the Cardinal are actually dissociated from their physical selves, viewing part of their identity outside of their bodies. Think about the notion of twins, Ferdinands’s shadow, the mandrake, and the Cardinal’s deathly reflection. In contrast, the artistically-modeled identities discussed as other selves are associated with the Duchess, and are particularly moving as comments on artistic creation since they illuminate the multiple identities portrayed in theatrical creation and performance; indeed, the multiple artistic renderings of the Duchess signal the historical figure of the Duchess d’Amalfi transformed into dramatic character, and performed by the actor’s body. Consider the “figure cut in alabaster” in the shape of the Duchess upon her late husband’s tomb, her discussion of herself as “holy relic” and voodoo-like doll, and the wax figures of Antonio and the children.

Indeed, we as audience are also consistently made “doubles,” dissociated from ourselves as spectators as we repeatedly view the characters as audience, voyeuristically watching and listening from behind the “arras” or the “traverse” on stage. In connection with this, consider the significance of the wax figures behind the traverse, offered up as both display and as voyeurs. Also, Ferdinand is thrilled that the Duchess is “plagued in art” (IV.i.109) and it might be interesting to consider how the play is using art to ‘plague’ or disconcert the audience.

One could argue that the dissociative self/or relic self—the recognition of the self outside of the body—is a particularly Catholic idea in the play, bound up with what would have been considered a materialist tradition which idolized icons and relics. As Ferdinand is seen “Behind St Marks Church, with the leg of a man/ Upon his shoulder . . . ,” one is reminded of the holy relics said to be the body parts of saints and the obvious grave-robbing (V.ii.14-5). Similarly, the Echo scene specifically takes place in “the ruins of an ancient abbey.” Why is the ruined abbey—a defunct place of Catholic worship—a perfect echo chamber? Perhaps it is a comment on the way in which the space of Catholic history serves as a great set on which to perform Protestant feeling. However, when thinking about the split self—the self speaking to its own voice—perhaps it is pointing to a sinister spiritualism within the Catholic tradition.

I will elaborate more on the portrayal of character doubleness and disassociation in my class presentation, and if I have time, I will hopefully slightly redeem the much-criticized film, Hotel by comparing the two works' somewhat similar representations of the physical body.