Dr. Lauren Shohet, English Department

Early-Modern English Theater

Students often need to be reminded (or informed) that early-modern theater does not ask its audience to suspend disbelief, but rather tends to emphasize its own artificiality. Evidence suggests that playgoers of all walks of life were quite sophisticated about questions of representation; this combines with the strong early-modem sense of the theatricality of self-presentation-indeed, of self-construction-to, make most Shakespearean plays understandable as complex engagements of intersections between theatricality (self-conscious performance, acting out a script, improvising from a role, polishing a persona for display) and everyday life.  Stephen Greenblatt's classic Renaissance Self-Fashioning (U Chicago P, 1980] offers elegant further reading on this topic.

Theatergoing seems to have been an important, although sometimes controversial, part of both popular and elite life in early-modem London. A large number of public theaters were constructed, beginning with The Theatre in 1576; elite audiences also engaged theater companies to perform in private venues. Most of these performance spaces were "in the round," creating for the audience the experience of watching other spectators observing the play, as well as the consciousness of being watched. (This combines with the factors mentioned above to make many early-modem plays, like Hitchcockian cinema, work as explorations of performativity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, duplicity). Asking students to compare experiences of watching action on a proscenium stage or cinema screen, from a darkened room, to watching a play in the round, naturally lit space of the early-modem theater can help emphasize the interpenetrations of "play" and "reality" in early modernity.

G. Blakemore Evans's Elizabethan Jacobean Drama: The Theatre in its Time [Black, 1988] pithily describes both what we know and what we don't about many aspects of early-modem theatrical experience; it also offers readable excerpts-appropriate for students-from apposite primary sources. Research has evolved since the book's writing, but most of what Evans characterizes as inconclusive remains so-if more detailed in its inconclusions.

Anti-theatricalism

The controversial status of theater in Shakespeare's England may provide stimulating connections to other course materials in sections emphasizing issues of censorship, popular culture, early Culture Wars, etc. Many students will know that closing the theaters was among the earliest actions of the Puritan parliament in 1642. What may surprise them is the breadth of concerns lumped together in anti-theatrical rhetoric: idleness, whoring, swearing, drinking, heresy, female assertiveness, disintegration of respect for elders and play-going! Thinking about these issues while studying a play-and/or trying to diagnose what pathology might underlie these seemingly scattered symptoms-may stimulate useful discussions of hierarchy, gender, artistic license and licentiousness, theatergoing and carnival, art and society and NEH funding debates, etc.

Some invective focuses particularly on cross-dressing: students may need reminding that women do not appear on the English stage in this period. For audiences, this seems to have been at issue only in plays like Twelfth Night that thematize cross-dressing-otherwise, well-trained boy actors seem to have offered stunning Juliets and Cleopatras, etc.  Some invective focuses particularly on actors miming aristocratic or royal status. The question of a commoner dressing as a monarch acquires particular resonance in the history plays: if an actor can play a king, what precisely constitutes royalty? Moreover, Shakespearean history plays portray usurpers (first-generation or descendents), most of whom emphasize their willed seizure and theatrical projection of power. Are kings merely good playwright-actors in history?

Analyzing several aspects of theater's place in society, Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England [U Chicago P, 1988] might be particularly provocative in its geographical discussion of theaters' location: largely on the margins of the city, adjacent to brothels, jails, and insane asylums.

On cross-dressing, further reading includes Laura Levine, Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization, 1 S 79-1642 [Cambridge UP, 1994] and the historically relevant chapters of Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety [Routledge, 1992]. On plays that do thematize the performance of gender, see Phyllis Rackin's "Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage," PMLA 102:1 [1987], 29-41, and Stephen Greenblatt's chapter "Fiction and Friction" in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England [U California P, 1988], which explicates early-modem scientific/medical models of sexual difference and associates them with Twelfth Night's explorations of gender difference, sameness, and transformation.

On the problem of theatricality and royal impersonation, see Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres [Methuen, 1986] and Christopher Pye's more psychoanalytically inflected The Regal Phantasm: Shakespeare and the Politics of Spectacle [Routledge, 1990]).

Cultural Contexts: Gender and "Degree"

Most modern Shakespeare scholars - and, evidence would suggest, most early-modem theater people, audiences, and government censors alike--conceive drama and history to mutually influence one another in complex and sometimes subtle ways (i.e., imaginative representation neither transparently reflects reality nor dictates its future shape, but rather encodes cultural concerns-in ways that may not or may not be immediately accessible to us, or indeed fully articulable to its instigators--and thenceforward bears some weight on the imaginations, and perhaps the thoughts and actions, of those who see, read, or hear about it.) Careful reading of early-modem dramatic texts can go a long way toward sketching out relevant cultural context, but students may be grateful for help on some aspects of Elizabethan-Jacobean social history, particularly the crucial categories of "degree" (rank or status) and gender.

To understand the issues in impersonating nobility, students may need background on both the concern for rank and status in Tudor-Stuart culture and its frequent Routing: the sumptuary laws that governed acceptable dress, according to rank, provide a colorful example. Questions about rank and status abound: What makes a person "valuable"? Can money trump rank? Can an educated, well-meaning person of the middling sort possess a "noble" character? Are feudal-aristocratic values of any use in a mercantile society? How do systems of rank and gender intersect (i.e. when does a high-status woman have more power than a low-status man, and when does masculinity confer universal privilege)?

Concern about gender-what it is, what it means, how it works-likewise pervade this culture and its drama. (I have found that some students arrive at Villanova believing that thinking about gender in Shakespearean plays anachronistically imports post-1970's concerns into texts that are uninterested in gender. Careful reading should dispel this.) Many plays stage disruptions in gender hierarchies, with varying, sometimes ambiguous degrees of resolution (students can think about how they would stage the "happy endings" of those comedies in which everyone gets married off, but the female protagonists stop speaking in the last act). In some plays, characters meditate on whether gender is an assumed performance or a given (does a scene invoking clumsy female impersonation-as in the mechanicals' play in Midsummer Night's Dream, or Cleopatra's fear of seeing "some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/f the posture of a whore"-alter the representation of femininity in the rest of the play?). In some plays (particularly histories), figurative language about femininity underscores the systematic exclusion of women from scenes of action. Other plays enable students to explore questions about whether women are persons or property; whether the opposite of "man" is "boy," "woman," or "monster."

(Karen Newman's Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama [U Chicago P, 1991 ] explores readably but with great nuance the interplay between gender relationships and state power, offering historical details that can be useful for bringing into class discussion. Catherine Belsey's The Subject of Tragedy [Methuen, 1985] provocatively proposes locating the origins of modem subjectivity in feminine silences. Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin's Engendering a Nation [Routledge, 1997] offers ways to think about gender and its importance in the evolving concept of "nation" in the history plays.)

Playwrights and Scripts

Early-modem plays had no "authors" in the modem sense, nor had they fixed texts. "Players" (actors) formed business partnerships; new plays were developed by the company, which then held proprietary rights (in theory-pirated performances ran rampant). Plays were put together in various degrees of collaboration, like a studio film today: playwright/actors would work together; different playwright/actors would take on different scenes; actors would improvise off sketched-out scripts; companies would cobble together bits of versions-or even plays-performed on different occasions). Play texts were not usually published; indeed, producing a written record of a play was not a task anyone would think to undertake. Roles were handed off from one actor to another. The textual records we have for early-modem plays are usually taken from prompt-books, from preliminary notes, or from what an actor might remember of a play and write out years after performing it. Moreover, companies did not treat plays as set texts: for different performances, scenes would be added, subtracted, or altered.

This can produce some interesting discussion questions or writing assignments. Students can discuss whether or not they would stage-or include in an edition-the deposition scene in Richard II, which occurred on stage in early performances, but offstage in later ones. How would they handle the two texts of King Lear, sufficiently different that the Norton Anthology includes both versions? Or, as editors, would they choose "sullied" or "solid" for Hamlet's complaint about flesh? What criteria go into these decisions? What understandings of history, of drama, of text, do each student's criteria entail? (It's reasonably easy to provide students the kind of information editors and directors have when making these decisions: textual notes in any good edition of the plays will give the variants, and most editions give brief discussions of differences among the sources; for assignments involving specific words, the Oxford English Dictionary indicates historically relevant usage.)

On relationships and disjunctions between early-modem theatrical practice and the use of Shakespeare as a cultural icon in our own times, I warmly recommend Stephen Orgel's "The Authentic Shakespeare," Representations 21 (Winter 1988), 1-25. For an overview as well as analysis of recent discussions of what it means to call a text "Shakespearean," see Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia, "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text" (Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993), 255-83J. On playwrighting, see Jeffrey Masten, Textual lntercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama [Cambridge UP, 1997].
Provocative further reading on the stakes and consequences of post Renaissance appropriations of "Shakespeare" include Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespearean Trade: Performances and Appropriations (U Penn P, 1998), and Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present [Weidenfeld & Nicolson,1989J. Alan Sinfield's "Give an Account of Shakespeare and Education, showing why you think they are effective and what you have appreciated about them. Support your comments with precise references" (Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Dollimore and Sinfield (Cornell UP, 1985)) raises wonderful issues about education and ideology that instructors might want to use in class discussion-the piece itself is not particularly accessible for students, using the British educational system for examples and assuming a certain familiarity with Marxist terms of analysis.

Working with Shakespearean Language

Detailed work with language of the plays often helps students dig into critical analysis. One technique that often works well in class is having students describe a given character's habits of speech: poetry or prose? Long sentences or short? Elegantly balanced rhetorical periods or choppy phrases? Does literal or figurative speech predominate? What kinds of figures? Are any characters linguistically indistinguishable? Students should work toward being able to identify characters from fragments of their speech (which can make a good quiz), then toward building arguments about the functions those speech patterns serve.  Conveying a balanced frame of mind? Strategic obfuscation? Connecting different thematic concerns? Revealing similarities among characters? Undermining a character's claims?

Another useful technique asks students to characterize the overall lexicon (set of words) associated with a particular scene, theme, or character. In Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, Lysander proposes "true love" "never running smooth" as a way to conceptualize the play's problems. Cataloguing the actual words linked with "love" in the first two scenes, however, reveals that descriptions of "love" consistently use words from lexica of banking, commerce, and exchange. Recognizing this as a potential challenge to Lysander's rather simplistic analysis can open up for students ways to ask larger questions about "true love" in the play: what is "love"? What's "true" about "true love"? What's its opposite: True hate? False love? Enchanted love? Mistaken love? Patriarchally approved love? Randomly bestowed love?

Recommended Edition

I find the New Folger series of the plays quite wonderful. Notes (on facing pages, in readable type) are consistently lucid and make use of up-to-date research as well as traditional wisdom; reproduced images of items in the Folger collection add visual information. A brief summary of each scene orients inexperienced students (while its presence also conveys, I think, that they need to read for more than "what happens next"). Each play is followed by a short essay by the editor which accessibly raises the range of questions emphasized in contemporary scholarship on the play (useful for instructors whether or not one asks students to read it) as well as a well-chosen annotated bibliography. The plays are sold individually  

A handful of plays that might work particularly well in the Villanova Seminar

The Merchant of Venice
I find that the comedies can be the most difficult plays for beginning students because they often seem to require more cultural background than other genres. Many students find Merchant particularly readable - characters interrupt one another less than in many plays, and often tend toward more familiar speech patterns - and it might intersect well with theological concerns of the course. Students will probably need some background on the cultural understandings of Jewishness at play in this period. Perhaps most central is the uneasiness that surrounds this particular kind of "othemess," both because it can be disguised and because it can be difficult to distinguish from Christianity. Early-modem Christians take Jews to be hugely, crucially mistaken - but the points' of difference between Judaism and Christianity are quite limited. In other words, a Christian whose understanding of Christ or salvation is in any way imperfect is, in essence ... a Jew! Indeed, arguing Christians accuse one another of "Judaizing".  See James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews [Columbia UP, 1996.

A few possible starting points on Merchant:
1) Students can draw up a list of binary differences between Venice (the world of commerce) and Belmont (ostensibly the pastoral alternative). Then, explore which of these distinctions hold up.  Most classes find that, for the most part, they don't: Belmont depends on money from Venice; fathers dictate their daughters' desires in both places; wooing and marriage require money in either place, etc.

2) How are Jews different from Christians in this play? (Or: Does Shylock contrast with Christian merchants, or figure them? Salerio's offhanded remark that going to church makes him think about merchant vessels would offer a good starting place, as would Shylock's fixation on the materiality and contracts that are, as Antonio points out, the basis of Venetian commerce, as well as the rapidly expanding mercantilist London economy.

3) Regarding Portia's speech accepting Bassanio as her husband: Is actively ceding authority different from yielding authority? Can one give away power? Why does Portia turn here to the language of mathematics and mercantilism?

Othello
One way this would work particularly well would be in sections exploring the invention of "race" in early modernity. Students may need to be reminded that "race" is not a category people use at this time (the word usually means "family"): rather, places where students see something that looks like modem racial thinking are to be taken as remarkable, perhaps foundational. On imaginative representation and the invention of race, see essays in Women, "Race, " and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ad. Hendricks and Parker [Routledge, 1994)). It may be interesting to think about the various ways Othello considers belonging and exclusion: military fraternity, male friendship, Venetian republican city government, family, gender, national origin, etc. What kinds of alliances are possible here? It's interesting to look at both Desdemona's and Othello's accounts of their courtship: what attracts each about the other? How are femininity and Africanness similar? How different?

Also interesting to many classes are the ways the play considers identity (particularly its fractures). How many ways can students gloss Iago's statement "I am not what I am"? How does this operate as the principle governing his actions? How does this relate to logo's role as stage-manager/pornographer, arranging scenes for voyeurs to peep at? Historically-minded sections may be interested in thinking about Iago as an early-modem version of the medieval vice character-what is new here? Similarly, how do students account for Othello's account of his suicide, when he functions both as agent and as the echo of the Turk, the "circumcised dog" he once slew in battle? Why does lago's plan to discredit Desdemona succeed so easily? What logic(s) of feminine or wifely identity does it engage?

The Tempest
Some classes gravitate toward treating this play as a watershed between Renaissance and modem ways of thinking about the world; some are more interested in it as a primal moment of colonialism; some discuss it as a female coming-of-age play. Connections among these can provide particularly fruitful areas for complicating and refining students' analyses: how do imagination and power serve one another? Compare magic spells, gubernatorial edict, and historical narrative as forms of Prospero's speech, for example. What functions does speech serve for Prospero, for Caliban, and for Miranda? What is the relationship between Prospero's roles as mage and ruler? How do Caliban's and Miranda's "educations" compare? What logic underlies Miranda's motherlessness? It can be useful for students to reconstruct the history of the island---e.g., from Sycorax's arrival to Gonzalo's, then add on the sequence of journeys and wanderings on the island represented in the play. From this template, students can search out echoes, contrasts, etc., while also thinking about the play as travel narrative--or as commentary on travel narrative.

If Star Trek: The Next Generation retains any currency among our students, its penultimate episode, "Emergence", makes an interesting companion to studying this play. The prologue shows characters rehearsing The Tempest (with some pretty good analysis by Patrick Stewart); the remainder of the episode concerns the materialization of autonomous entities from the starship's computer systems, whose communication with the crew is enabled by holodeck representations of these new electrical life forms. The episode thus quite cogently engages a range of issues central to The Tempest: dramatic representation as a self-conscious vehicle for communication, the end of an era, Renaissance magic on the one hand, the completed run of the television series, interactions among human and non-human beings, the role of imaginative projection in working out evolving models of subjectivity, etc.

Macbeth offers a formally tidy and pedagogically relatively manageable tragedy. Questions of the "natural"--as well as the unnatural, the nature of humans, the nature of nature, etc.-might provide good connections to other course materials. Particularly interesting to many students are violations of "natural" sex and gender conventions in this play. Some may need reminding that this culture believes in witches (they should not hastily exclude all but Bergmanesque psychological accounts of the witches' appearances). "Monstrosity" provides a useful and historically appropriate way to think about what is not "natural" here: the "monstrous" includes that which is neither male nor female-which describes both the witches and dominating wives/uxorious husbands. What do students see as the relationship between the rather appealing Macbeth marriage-equitable and companionate-and its bloody undertakings? If the failure of patriarchalism-either to assert male control within marriage, or to maintain political fealty and protective decorum in the realm-is "unnatural," what do students make of the "natural" fathers' haste to leave their families to join battle (Lady Macduff calls her dead husband a "traitor), or of Siward's apparent willingness to see innumerable sons fall in battle, so long as it be honorably?

Students also may be interested in considering the rather complex national politics surrounding this play. Presented to the recently anointed James I, the Scottish king who united the Scottish and English-Welsh throne, and who wrote a book about demonology, the play celebrates James' semi-mythic ancestor Fleance. But the play also depicts Scotland as a land of barbarous turmoil, which turns to the English throne for help. (Should James take this as compliment or insult? How does the play construct "Britishness"? Or would "Englishness" be a more appropriate term?)

Richard III
Most of the history plays can work well for discussing competing models of kingship, the relationship between acting and ruling, and models of nationhood. Indeed, many classes like to discuss the role of national myth-making in nationalist culture generally. What kinds of stories to cultures tell about their origins? What American artifacts would be comparable to Shakespearean history plays? What roles do they play in forming subjects [or citizens]?

Students may need to know that history plays enjoy something of a vogue on the Elizabethan-Jacobean stage, and that this coincides historically with vigorous-although incomplete and often confused-assertions of "national" identity in a society that had previously thought about affinity groups and loyalties more in terms of religion, guild, region, etc. Thus students need to realize that nationalism is an emergent, not fully articulated notion, rather than a common-sense concept of long standing. .(What models of nationhood does a given play offer? Moreover, how does watching the spectacle form certain kinds of subjects?)

It also may be helpful for students to think about questions of patronage, deference, and dynastic myth: history plays are about ancestors or rivals of the reigning monarch (who may attend a performance, and who appoints the censor who licenses the play). Moreover, early modem history plays and their spectators frequently understand themselves in the context of the "mirror for magistrates" tradition: Elizabeth, James, and their subjects frequently assume dramatic productions to be offering commentary or advice on their political personae, policies, etc. (What qualities does the play value in a monarch? Which virtues are potential vices? What models of succession does it favor? (particularly pressing in Richard X, initially staged before Elizabeth has declared her successor) What forms of ritual and tradition serve society well, and what forms seem bankrupt? How does the play represent the crucial and delicate issue of counsel-can one speak truth to power in the play? If so, how? In what ways might the play preemptively negotiate risks of censorship or offense? How does this shape the play?)

Richard III represents such a range of political theory that it seems a good bet for engaging other course texts-particularly, of course, for sections reading Machiavelli. Although all the history plays experiment with self-conscious theatricality, this is perhaps most marked in Richard III, whose explicitly theatrical language and efforts to manipulate audience response lend themselves to student analysis. Students maybe interested to learn of Richard III's popularity on the early-modem stage-coupled with a tradition in political treatises of using Richard as an example of particularly vicious tyranny: is evil more interesting than good in the theater? What does this mean in a culture that thinks about selfhood theatrically? What is the relationship between Richard's "unnaturalness" , figured in his deformity as well as his tyranny, and his capacity for self-invention? What place does Richard's extraordinary verbal prowess play in his seizure of power? Is language inherently dangerous, or merely a plastic instrument?

The 1995 Richard III starring Ian McKellan and set in fascist Jazz-Age Europe, dazzles students when shown after they've worked through the text many have never seen a really successful adaptation of an early-modem play.