Making Sex on the Early Modern Stage: Class Notes 9/20

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

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

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)

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

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

Making Sex on the Early Modern Stage