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Introduction: Materializing the Immaterial N o t e s Introduction: Materializing the Immaterial 1. Translation in Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, eds., The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1983), 105. 2. John Spalding Gatton, “‘There must be blood’: Mutilation and Martyrdom on the Medieval Stage,” in Violence in Drama, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 87. 3 . S e e e s p e c i a l l y w o r k a s s o c i a t e d w i t h t h e Records of Early English Drama (REED) proj- ect, overviews of which are available in Audrey Douglas and Sally-Beth MacLean, eds., REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); and Peter Holland, “Theatre without Drama: Reading REED,” in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 43–67. 4 . S e e , f o r e x a m p l e , J o h n H . A s t i n g t o n , Actors and Acting in Shakespeare’s Time: The Art of Stage Playing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jennifer A. Low and Nova Myhill, eds., Imagining the Audience in Early Modern Drama, 1558–1642 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Joanne Rochester, Staging Spectatorship in the Plays of Philip Massinger (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010); and Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 5. See, for instance, Michelle M. Dowd and Natasha Korda, eds., Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011); Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Roslyn Lander Knutson, Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6. On performance as that which disappears, see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); for a recent counterargument, see Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011). 7. See, for example, Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Lena Cowen Orlin, ed., Material London, ca. 1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 168 Notes 8. Object-centered scholarship has thus been criticized by some for having a conserva- tive streak. Although some working in this area have strong Marxist roots, the field as a whole has moved away from questions of political ideology and class conflict that informed the cultural materialism of the late 1980s and early 1990s. See Douglas Bruster, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 191–205; Crystal Bartolovich, “Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be? A Response to Peter Stallybrass’s ‘The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things,’” Early Modern Culture 1, no. 1 (2000), http:// emc.eserver.org/1–1/bartolovich.html; and Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 1–25. In theatre stud- ies, Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), usefully analyzes contemporary performance from a cultural materialist perspective. 9 . S e e J u d i t h B u t l e r , Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). “Performativity” in Butler is not the same thing as performance. On the intersection between the two, see Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds., Performativity and Performance (New York: Routledge, 1995); and W. B. Worthen, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA 113 (1998): 1093–107. 10. On theatre as a semiotic system, see Marvin A. Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2002); Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982); and Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). See also Jean Alter, A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), discussed further in chapter 4, and Nicholas Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), which analyzes semiotic crises onstage. 1 1 . M i c h e l F o u c a u l t , The Archaeology of Knowledge; and, The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 131. 1 2 . B u t l e r , Bodies That Matter, 250n5. 13. When I do use the term “Renaissance,” I refer specifically to this humanist tradi- tion. On the difficulties of both terms, see Jennifer Summit and David Wallace, eds., “Medieval/Renaissance: After Periodization,” special issue, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 3 (2007). On the cultural authority of drama as text versus performance, see W. B. Worthen, Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Worthen, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Robert Weimann, Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre, ed. Helen Higbee and William West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 14. See, in particular, Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, rev. ed. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1988); and Tim Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995). On notions of the popular in theatre and performance studies, see Victor Emeljanow, “Editorial,” Popular Entertainment Studies 1, no. 1 (2010): 1–5. NOTES 169 1 5 . B u r k e , Popular Culture, xviii. 16. On historical phenomenology’s theoretical premises and stakes, see Bruce R. Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA 115 (2000): 318–29; and Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). For a good introduction to early modern affect studies more generally, see Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On the overlapping field of cognitive studies in theatre, see Evelyn B. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Shakespeare’s Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Other references are too numerous to note. 17. See, for example, Stephen Cohen, ed., Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007); Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122 (2007): 558–69; and Mark David Rasmussen, ed., Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Working within and beyond historical formalism, see also Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 18. Among innumerable examples, see especially Zachary Lesser, Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Peter Stallybrass et al., “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004): 379–419. 1 9 . A d a m F o x , Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 18. 20. Ibid., 14. 21. Peter W. M. Blayney, “The Publication of Playbooks,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 385. 22. Ibid., 384; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 14; and Lesser, Politics of Publication, 20. 23. Douglas A. Brooks, From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71. 24. Blayney, “Publication of Playbooks,” 389. 25. W. R. Streitberger, “Personnel and Professionalization,” in Cox and Kastan, New History, 337. 2 6 . R o s l y n L a n d e r K n u t s o n , The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company, 1594–1613 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 29–30; and Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 103–4. 2 7 . K n u t s o n , Repertory, 33. 2 8 . A n d r e w G u r r , Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24–25; and Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 213. 2 9 . G u r r , Playgoing, 69. 30. As a point of comparison, the National Safety Council reports that in 2007, the odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident were 1 in 88. National Safety Council, Injury Facts, 2011 ed., http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Picture%20Library/News/web_graph ics/Injury_Facts_37.pdf, accessed April 3, 2011. 31. Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Erne, “The Popularity of Shakespeare in Print,” Shakespeare 170 Notes Survey 62 (2009): 12–29; and Zachary Lesser, Peter Stallybrass, and G.
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  • Compare the Use of the Unities in the Tempest and the Alchemist. What Differences in Function and Effect Are There? Hayley Powell
    Volume 3: 2010-2011 ISSN: 2041-6776 School of English Studies Compare the use of the unities in The Tempest and The Alchemist. What differences in function and effect are there? Hayley Powell McDonald has critiqued literary criticism of Shakespeare and Jonson as drawing too heavily on their dissimilar plays: in doing so it ‘establishes a simplified construction of each dramatic style in relation to its antithesis.’1 Both The Tempest and The Alchemist adhere to the three unities of time, place and action, as prescribed in Sidney’s Apologie for Poesie.2 An adherence to the unities is usually viewed from a dramaturgical perspective as either promoting or limiting verisimilitude. As these two plays share a fundamental similarity in their adherence to the neoclassical unities, this essay aims to explore more than just stating them as the ‘opposite poles’ of Renaissance comedy.3 By comparing two plays which share this aspect of dramatic style, in examining the differences in function and in effect in their deployment of this adherence to the unities, it might be possible to reveal deeper thematic differences in The Tempest and The Alchemist. The unity of action is adhered to by Shakespeare and Jonson in distinctly different ways. Jonson’s The Alchemist follows the rise and fall of the plot to make Subtle, Face and Doll rich. While The Alchemist has been famously praised for having one of ‘the most perfect plots in English Literature’4 throughout the play itself there is an overriding sense of improvisation which contributes greatly to comedic effect: when Face and Subtle bounce off each other to unexpected events with quick-wittedness in exchanges such as this: Face: God’s lid, we never thought of him, until now.
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