Vol. XXIV Clemson University Digital Press Digital Facsimile Vol. XXIV THE • VPSTART • CROW• Contents Part One: Shakespeare's Jests and Jesters John R.. Ford • Changeable Taffeta: Re-dressing the Bears in Twelfth Night . 3 Andrew Stott • "The Fondness, the Filthinessn: Deformity and Laughter in Early-Modem Comedy........................................................................... 15 Tamara Powell and Sim Shattuck • Looking for Liberation and Lesbians in Shakespeare's Cross-Dressing Comedies ...................... ...................... 25 Rodney Stenning Edgecombe • "The salt fish is an old coar' in The Merry Wives of Windsor 1. 1 ................................•.....•..... .......•. ... ...... ......... ..... 34 Eve-Marie Oesterlen • Why Bodies Matter in Mouldy Tales: Material (Re)Tums in Pericles, Prince of Tyre .......................... ...... ...... ......... ... ................... 36 Gretchen E. Minton • A Polynesian Shakespeare Film: The Maori Merchant of Venice ............................................................................................... 45 Melissa Green • Tribal Shakespeare: The Federal Theatre Project's "Voo- doo Macbeth n(1936) ........................................ ...... ......... ... ............... .... 56 Robert Zaller • "Send the Head to Angelon: Capital Punishment in Measure for Measure ................................................................................:......... 63 Richard W. Grinnell • Witchcraft, Race, and the Rhetoric of Barbarism in Othello and 1 Henry IV.......................................................................... 72 Raymond Luczak • Love Poems and Premature Elegy............................... 81 Part Two: Festival Reviews John R. Ford • '7he Virtue of this Jesr: The Productions of Clemson Shakespeare Festival XIII ....................... ........ ............ ... ... ................... 85 Craig Barrow • The 2004 Alabama Shakespeare Festival's Macbeth and Titus Andronicus ..................................................................................... 91 Craig Barrow • The 2004 Stratford Festival of canada's Timon of Athens ......... 97 Michael Shurgot • Oregon Shakespeare Festival2004 ............................... 101 Part Three: Book Reviews James Stredder. The North Face of Shakespeare: Activities for Teaching the Plays. REVIEWED BY JAMES MARDOCK ............................................................ 114 ClemsonClemson UniversityUniversity DigitalDigital PressPress DigitalDigital FacsimileFacsimile Vol. XXIV 2 The Upstart Crow Stephen Greenblatt. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. REVIEWED BY JOHN PAUL SPIRO .......................................................... 116 List of Illustrations Design for Australia and New Zealand Shakespeare Association logo, Sixth Biennial Conference ................................................................................ 45 Clemson Shakespeare Festival XIII (2004) cartoon ............................................... 84 Kathleen McCall as Lady Macbeth, Alabama Shakespeare Festival2004 ............... 92 Philip Pleasants as Titus Andronicus, Alabama Shakespeare Festival2004 ...... 94 Peter Donaldson as Timon, Stratford Festival2004 ........................................ 97 Andrew Muir as Philotus and Peter Donaldson as Timon, Stratford Festival 2004 ....................................................................................................... 99 Peter Donaldson as Timon, Stratford Festival2004 ...................................... 100 Ray Porter as Antipholus of Syracuse and Laura Morache as Waitress, Oregon Shakespeare Festival2004 ....................................................... 101 The Comedy of Errors: Ensemble, Oregon Shakespeare Festival2004 ....... 102 Robin Goodrin Nordli as Beatrice, Oregon Shakespear& Festival2004 ........ 105 Much Ado About Nothing. Ensemble, Oregon Shakespeare Festival2004 .. 105 Tony DeBruno as Gloucester comforted by Kenneth Albers as Lear, Ore- gon Shakespeare Festival 2004 ............................................................ 109 . Tony DeBruno as Gloucester and Gregory Linington as Edgar, Oregon Shakespeare Festival2004 ................................................................... 111 Announcement for Clemson Shakespeare Festival XV, 2006 ......................... 82 Call for Papers for The Upstart Crow Vol. XXV ............................................. 120 Editorial Note: Beginning with this volume, Elizabeth Rivlin (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004) joins the staff of The Upstart Crow as co-editor with Wayne Chapman, who herein concludes his tenure as interim editor, returning to the ranks as an associate editor and maintaining primary responsibility as the journal's publisher. Professor Rivlin is also the director of Clemson's Shakespeare Festival. We are grateful to our contributors for making every effort to trace all copyright­ holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. We also thank the several festival sponsors for their cooperation and assistance in the reproduction of images from recent performances. ClemsonClemson UniversityUniversity DigitalDigital PressPress DigitalDigital FacsimileFacsimile Vol. XXIV CHANGEABLE TAFFETA: RE-DRESSING THE BEARS IN TWELFTH NIGHT by John R. Ford he various inhabitants· of Twelfth Nighfs lllyria are almost as pre~ccupied with Tspeculating about the complex intrigues they weave-or find themselves woven into-as they are in performing those plots. 1 And when they do speculate, they think in terms of a wide variety of metaphors all pertaining to games or pastimes with which John Manningham, or any of his fellow auditors in. the audience, either at Middle Temple or the Globe, might have been familiar. The nature of those pastimes, howev­ er, varies widely. Sometimes the theatre itself comes to mind, as when Fabian, swept up by the over-ingeniousness of his own plotting, announces, "if this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction" (3.4.108-09). Or when Feste, donning his costume as Sir Topas, confides to the audience that he might be a little o'erparted for his new role: "Well, I'll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in't, and l would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown. I am not tall enough to become the function well, nor lean enough to be thought a good student" (4.2.4-7). Festa may well be, as Viola attests, a canny actor, "wise enough to play the fool" (3.1.50), but the details of Feste's own tropes remind us that play-acting was only one of many pastimes that suggested themselves to these revelers and anti-revelers. If the first performance of Twelfth Night was indeed held before an audience of law students, teachers, and lawyers at Middle Temple, perhaps Shakespeare, through Festa's (or Robert Armin's) costume and girth, was playfully mocking his audience with a compar­ ison to the rule-bound games of the university and legal professions, complete with gowns, academic or judicial, and thin-faced students who knew how to keep to the windy side of the law. · Those costumes and performances, of course, also suggest the wild decorum of revelry itself, those matters for May mornings that Fabian remembers and that C. L. Barber long ago established as the shaping force behind festive comedy. 2 Angela Hurworth has explored a less savory festive presence behind the language and con­ ventions of Twelfth Night. 3 Her evidence suggests that these characters were just as· likely to think of their behavior in terms of the underworld sport of gull-catching, a kind of rule-bound thievery, not entirely unknown to either actors or lawyers, and marked by conventions that link it to other games and sports as well as to disguises, traditional roles, and plotting strategies that shaped theatrical performances.• Maria, Fabian's "noble gull-catcher" (2.5.154), plays the role of "mistress of the game," or "barnard" while Toby and Fabian act as her lesser accomplices, roles described by Robert Greene in The Art of Cony-Catching as "the setter" and "the verser" respectively. 5 Andrew and Malvolio are described throughout the play as "gulls." Indeed, Malvolio, this anti-theatrical "kind or Puritan, assumes the role himself. He has been "made," as he insists in the play's final scene, "the most notorious geck and gull/ That e'er inven­ tion played on" (5.1.322-23). Moreover, the "performance" of gull-catching, like that of a play, required an appreciative audience to take pleasure in such a "common recre­ ation."~~ Perhaps the sport that is most consistently on the minds of all these comic aggres­ sors and victims is, as both Stephen Dickey and Jason Scott-Warren have argued, the "sportful malice" of bear-baiting. 7 Several characters in Twelfth Night imagine them­ selves or others in the role of bear, the baiting dogs, or both. Early in the play Orsino's ClemsonClemson UniversityUniversity DigitalDigital PressPress DigitalDigital FacsimileFacsimile Vol. XXIV 4 The Upstart Crow infatuated comparison of himself to Actaeon spying on his Diana/Olivia metamor­ phoses into the language of bear-baiting, or, at the very least, to hart-baiting. Appropriate to Orsino's self-love, his metaphor casts him as both pursuer and pursued. When invited to hunt the hart, Orsino responds: 0 when mine eyes did see Olivia first, Methought she purged the air of pestilence; That instant was I turned into a hart, And my desires like fell