Claire M. L. Bourne
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- July 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780198848790
- eISBN:
- 9780191883149
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198848790.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Chapter 4 argues that techniques of illustrating early modern plays were designed to correspond to the effects those same plays were said to have had in performance. It studies the careful ...
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Chapter 4 argues that techniques of illustrating early modern plays were designed to correspond to the effects those same plays were said to have had in performance. It studies the careful composition of custom-made woodcuts in a trio of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher quartos: The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), A King and No King (1619), and Philaster (1620). These plays cemented Beaumont and Fletcher’s widely acknowledged reputation for creating a pleasurable sense of not-knowing for playgoers through clever plotting. The title-page images present seemingly contradictory but equally viable forecasts of the plays’ endings and enhance readerly uncertainty through visual paradox. By contrast, the engravings made for the 1711 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Works depicted single, isolated moments. In step with the resurgence of neoclassical principles of dramatic decorum in the late seventeenth century, these engravings attempted to unify readers’ attention where the earlier woodcuts had sought to confuse it to pleasing effect.Less
Chapter 4 argues that techniques of illustrating early modern plays were designed to correspond to the effects those same plays were said to have had in performance. It studies the careful composition of custom-made woodcuts in a trio of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher quartos: The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), A King and No King (1619), and Philaster (1620). These plays cemented Beaumont and Fletcher’s widely acknowledged reputation for creating a pleasurable sense of not-knowing for playgoers through clever plotting. The title-page images present seemingly contradictory but equally viable forecasts of the plays’ endings and enhance readerly uncertainty through visual paradox. By contrast, the engravings made for the 1711 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Works depicted single, isolated moments. In step with the resurgence of neoclassical principles of dramatic decorum in the late seventeenth century, these engravings attempted to unify readers’ attention where the earlier woodcuts had sought to confuse it to pleasing effect.
Lesel Dawson
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- January 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199266128
- eISBN:
- 9780191708688
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199266128.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Women's Literature
The discourse of love, which is subjective, private, and instinctive, is also culturally constructed, public, and learned; it emphasizes the way in which the expression of reflexive feelings is bound ...
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The discourse of love, which is subjective, private, and instinctive, is also culturally constructed, public, and learned; it emphasizes the way in which the expression of reflexive feelings is bound up in wider historical narratives about bodies and interiority. In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical aetiologies and cures. This book analyses literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. It considers the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and green sickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. It also examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy, inverting much of the medical advice for what is held to be healthy in romantic love and promoting a different hierarchical relationship between the sexes. Finally, this study considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness, illuminating ideas about masculinity as well as some of the psychic contradictions of erotic desire. Authors considered include: Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, and William Davenant.Less
The discourse of love, which is subjective, private, and instinctive, is also culturally constructed, public, and learned; it emphasizes the way in which the expression of reflexive feelings is bound up in wider historical narratives about bodies and interiority. In early modern medical texts, intense unfulfilled erotic desire is held to be a real and virulent disease: it is classified as a species of melancholy, with physical aetiologies and cures. This book analyses literary representations of lovesickness in relation to medical ideas about desire and wider questions about gender and identity, exploring the different ways that desire is believed to take root in the body, how gender roles are encoded and contested in courtship, and the psychic pains and pleasures of frustrated passion. It considers the relationship between women's lovesickness and other female maladies (such as hysteria and green sickness), and asks whether women can suffer from intellectual forms of melancholy generally thought to be exclusively male. It also examines the ways in which Neoplatonism offers an alternative construction of love to that found in natural philosophy, inverting much of the medical advice for what is held to be healthy in romantic love and promoting a different hierarchical relationship between the sexes. Finally, this study considers how anxieties concerning love's ability to emasculate the male lover emerge indirectly in remedies for lovesickness, illuminating ideas about masculinity as well as some of the psychic contradictions of erotic desire. Authors considered include: Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, John Ford, and William Davenant.
Lorna Hutson
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- October 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199657100
- eISBN:
- 9780191808692
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199657100.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies, Drama
This chapter shows how the imagined circumstances of a Shakespeare play are not designed to be objectively coherent. Rather, circumstances ‘invent’ ethical and political arguments in ways that make ...
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This chapter shows how the imagined circumstances of a Shakespeare play are not designed to be objectively coherent. Rather, circumstances ‘invent’ ethical and political arguments in ways that make them seem imaginatively real. So, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, famous for its geographical incoherence, ‘Milan’ and ‘Verona’ are not objective locales but aspects of the ethical question of whether social success ‘abroad’ entails infidelity to the values of ‘home’. This question, posed by Proteus’ mimetic rivalry with Valentine and mocked by the Vices, Lance and Speed, is developed through a metaphorical association of rhetorical emotion and mercantial sea-motion that transforms abstraction into an imaginable world. The chapter then considers how other dramatists (Gascoigne, Lyly, Jonson) became aware of the forensic uses of circumstances in Terentian drama. Finally, it reads Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy as an invention of the circumstantial questions of ‘Where?’ and ‘How?’ to justify, forensically, an instance of tyrannicide.Less
This chapter shows how the imagined circumstances of a Shakespeare play are not designed to be objectively coherent. Rather, circumstances ‘invent’ ethical and political arguments in ways that make them seem imaginatively real. So, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, famous for its geographical incoherence, ‘Milan’ and ‘Verona’ are not objective locales but aspects of the ethical question of whether social success ‘abroad’ entails infidelity to the values of ‘home’. This question, posed by Proteus’ mimetic rivalry with Valentine and mocked by the Vices, Lance and Speed, is developed through a metaphorical association of rhetorical emotion and mercantial sea-motion that transforms abstraction into an imaginable world. The chapter then considers how other dramatists (Gascoigne, Lyly, Jonson) became aware of the forensic uses of circumstances in Terentian drama. Finally, it reads Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy as an invention of the circumstantial questions of ‘Where?’ and ‘How?’ to justify, forensically, an instance of tyrannicide.
