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?
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