The Spectacle of Sovereignty: The Abject Multitude in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris and Shakespeare’s (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Julia Schleck, for her many helpful comments, as well as her advice and encouragement throughout my time at the University of Nebraska. I am also deeply thankful to Carole Levin for her mentorship and kindness over the years, and her support of this project. I am also grateful to Stephen Buhler for his years of tutelage as well as Kelly Stage for supporting and reading this thesis. I must also acknowledge my unending thanks for the Department of English and the Department of Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Nebraska, and their continued support of my scholarship. I also thank my family for their continued support throughout my life and in the development of this project, especially my mother and father. I must also express all my gratitude to my husband and best friend, Bryson, for his unyielding reassurance. Also, thank you to all my dear friends who helped me get through these two years of graduate school, especially Catherine Medici-Thiemann and Alyson Alvarez for keeping me grounded, caffeinated, and motivated to do my best work. Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1 "Let her have needful but not lavish means": Bridewell's History………………………………………………………...….7 Chapter 2 "The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail Against Her": Elite Women's Detention and Reform………………………………………16 Chapter 3 "I do repent me as it is an evil, And take the shame with joy": Shakespeare's Other Juliet ……………………………………………….….
Textual Practice, 2019
In his treatise The Right to the City, published in Paris just before the student riots of 1968, Henri Lefebvre claims that inhabitants have a ‘right to the city’ which supersedes the rights of property owners and advocates ‘re-appropriation’ of the city, resulting in ‘collective ownership and management of space’. Lefebvre’s radical proposals inspired his students to take more direct action, and present-day movements such as the Occupy protests continue to cite his concept of ‘the right to the city’ as their inspiration. Shakespeare for his part, however, in his history plays presents what amounts to a nightmare counterpoint to Lefebvre’s dream. In 2 Henry VI, an analogue of ‘the right to the city’ appears as might be called ‘the right to the commons’. Far from bringing about any kind of ‘concrete utopia’, however, the Jack Cade Rebellion quickly degenerates into horrifying bloodshed. In Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, Shakespeare again presents what seems to be point-for-point opposition to anarchic populism such as Lefebvre’s. Shakespeare and Lefebvre share some important common ground, however, in their sense that mob violence is a response to subjective alienation, distinct from any more objective deprivation. Within the Hegelian tradition, Charles Taylor, Francis Fukuyama, and Axel Honneth have written extensively on the desire for recognition as an engine of political conflict. Violence is not always coldly calculating, but instead, spurred on by an emotion: indignation. More than any material change in what Marx would call the ‘conditions of production’, Shakespeare’s peasants and plebeians want to be recognized as worthy of respect; in the language of Coriolanus, they want their ‘voices’ to be heard. Riots and rebellions are their way of protecting that right.
Critical assumptions on William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure usually centre on the relationship between sex and moral issues. However, the play also questions political control and the supervision of human behaviour. This paper offers an alternative, personal, feminist reading of Measure for Measure by focusing on the differences between male and female moral values in the play. After exposing a brief summary of the problems that traditional and feminist critics face concerning Measure for Measure, I will pay special attention to the articulation of social subversion and to the connection between sexual and political frailty in Shakespeare’s work by referring to some characters and specific scenes. It is my aim to explore the complex ways in which male and female spheres reflect and influence each other in Measure for Measure, a dark play which questions the limits of patriarchy and the workings of unethical behaviour.
This paper discusses the many uses of free speech and silence in Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama 'The Tragedy of Mariam' from the perspective of their dynamic rhetorical deployment in the play. Contrary to the dominant critical thinking on the role of speech in Cary work, which sees the locus of female agency in unrestrained speech, the article explores the possibility that both free speech and silence may be used performatively, as an act of defiance of one’s king and husband. As “signs of discontent”, silence and free speech may be employed to oppose tyranny both private and public, but Cary’s work demonstrates that this resistance endangers the unruly subject/ disloyal wife by facilitating accusations of duplicity and treason.
“Authority and Subversion in Shakespeare’s Henry IV.”
Critical Theory, Textual Application. Ed. Shormistha Panja. [ISBN 81-86423-76-1.], 2002
Shakespeare criticism has come a long way from flogging the Tillyardian construct of the history plays although the bogey is yet to be comprehensively exorcised. 1 Although Riggs sees the "Tudor myth" operating "throughout the cycle" of Shakespeare"s history plays, he does situate Shakespeare"s chronicle plays within a veritable industry of similar productions that remain generic interlopers between the more fully developed dramatic forms of "the moral interlude, de casibus tragedy, chivalric romance, and the Senecan revenge play." 2 Apart from establishing the essentially impure and pluralistic format of the history plays Riggs dwells briefly on Tudor ideology"s politically expedient course of making the popular heroical drama more rigorously "historical." 3 Tennenhouse, equipped with a vastly sophisticated critical armoury,
European Romantic Review, 2006
This essay examines Elizabeth Inchbald’s treatment of French Revolutionary women and relationship to European drama in order to appreciate the implications of tragic writing for British women playwrights. Focusing on Inchbald’s connections to French culture and English theater in late 1792 and early 1793 elucidates the self‐censoring and generic conventions of her only tragedy, The Massacre. Events in France like the September Massacres unsettled Burkean notions of femininity and raised the possibility of female violence. This mixing of traditional gender characteristics resembles discourse about Inchbald’s dramas as neither tragic, comic, nor tragicomic. The genre of tragic farce describes Inchbald’s revisions of French sentimental comedy (comédie larmoyante) and experimentations with the evolving form of drama (drame). Inchbald’s adaptation of Gresset’s The Villain (Le Méchant) into a farce, Young Men and Old Women, demonstrates techniques applied to The Massacre and Every One Has His Fault. The paper concludes with a comparison of The Massacre to its source, Louis‐Sébastien Mercier’s drama, Jean Hennuyer, or the Bishop of Lizieux (1773), the first documentation of this once‐uncertain genealogy. This comparative analysis shows that Inchbald’s tragedy critiques the comic improbability that women stand to lose their femininity if they involve themselves in public issues.
Review of Nichole Miller, Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity
Sixteenth-Century Journal (Forthcoming)
Nichole E. Miller's Violence and Grace brings six English Renaissance plays into dialogue with six "political philosophers of the first part of the twentieth century" (3). The purpose of this dialogue is twofold. The first is to show that "modern political phenomena" have their origins in "medieval and Renaissance political theology," and the second is to illumine an important but neglected feature common to both (early modern) political theology and (modern) political theory. "Both early modern dramatists and modern political thinkers," writes Miller, "inflect the idea of 'exception' when it comes to life, focusing on gender and sexuality as primary sites of this inflection" (3). Miller's book aims to bring to light and critique the historically gendered and sexualized inflection of two of political theology's most fundamental (and influential) formulations: (a) Carl Schmitt's declaration in Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty that the sovereign is "he who decides on the exception" (5; quoted on 67); and (b) Giorgio Agamben's distinction in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life between bios and zoe-between the human form of life of the polis and the "bare life" that is excepted or cut off from it (5). These two formulations reflect the two halves of Violence and Grace as well as the two terms of its title. The book's prologue and first two chapters uncover a series of tacit links between masculine (and often misogynist) forms of violence and historical representations of DRAFT COPY