Class Notes (for 9/22)

• Titus showing @ 6:30 pm on Monday.
  

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

Emily’s Presentation

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

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

Responses/Discussion

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