Shakespeare and Hospitality

Shakespeare and Hospitality

Shakespeare and Hospitality This volume focuses on hospitality as a theoretically and historically cru- cial phenomenon in Shakespeare’s work with ramifications for contempo- rary thought and practice. Drawing a multifaceted picture of Shakespeare’s numerous scenes of hospitality—with their depictions of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and sheltering—the collection demonstrates how hospital- ity provides a compelling frame for the core ethical, political, theological, and ecological questions of Shakespeare’s time and our own. By reading Shakespeare’s plays in conjunction with contemporary theory as well as early modern texts and objects—including almanacs, recipe books, hus- bandry manuals, and religious tracts—this book reimagines Shakespeare’s playworld as one charged with the risks of hosting (rape and seduction, war and betrayal, enchantment and disenchantment) and the limits of gen- erosity (how much can or should one give the guest, with what attitude or comportment, and under what circumstances?). This substantial volume maps the terrain of Shakespearean hospitality in its rich complexity, offering key historical, rhetorical, and phenomenological approaches to this diverse subject. David B. Goldstein is Associate Professor of English at York University, Canada. Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Routledge Studies in Shakespeare 1 Shakespeare and Philosophy 10 Embodied Cognition and Stanley Stewart Shakespeare’s Theatre The Early Modern 2 Re-playing Shakespeare in Asia Body-Mind Edited by Poonam Trivedi and Edited by Laurie Johnson, Minami Ryuta John Sutton, and Evelyn Tribble 3 Crossing Gender in Shakespeare Feminist Psychoanalysis and the 11 Mary Wroth and Difference Within Shakespeare James W. Stone Edited by Paul Salzman and Marion Wynne-Davies 4 Shakespeare, Trauma and Contemporary Performance 12 Disability, Health, and Catherine Silverstone Happiness in the Shakespearean Body 5 Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Edited by Sujata Iyengar Form of the Book Contested Scriptures 13 Skepticism and Belonging in Travis DeCook and Alan Galey Shakespeare’s Comedy Derek Gottlieb 6 Radical Shakespeare Politics and Stagecraft in the 14 Shakespeare, Romeo and Early Career Juliet, and Civic Life Christopher Fitter The Boundaries of Civic Space 7 Retheorizing Shakespeare Edited by Silvia Bigliazzi through Presentist Readings and Lisanna Calvi James O’Rourke 15 Shakespeare in Hate 8 Memory in Shakespeare’s Emotions, Passions, Histories Selfhood Stages of Forgetting in Early Peter Kishore Saval Modern England Jonathan Baldo 16 Shakespeare and Hospitality Ethics, Politics, and 9 Reading Shakespeare through Exchange Philosophy Edited by David B. Goldstein Peter Kishore Saval and Julia Reinhard Lupton Shakespeare and Hospitality Ethics, Politics, and Exchange Edited by David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Goldstein, David B., 1972– editor. | Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 1963– editor. Title: Shakespeare and hospitality: ethics, politics, and exchange / edited by David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton. Description: First edition. | First edition. | New York: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge studies in Shakespeare; 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016002122 Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Knowledge— Manners and customs. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation. | Hospitality in literature. | Manners and customs in literature. | Hospitality—History. Classification: LCC PR3069.M3 S53 2016 | DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002122 ISBN: 978-1-138-79716-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-75734-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra Contents Introduction 1 D AVID B. GOLDSTEIN AND JULIA REINHARD LUPTON Part I Oikos and Polis 1 “Will You Walk in, My Lord?”: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Anxiety of Oikos 17 ANDREW HISCOCK 2 A Digression to Hospitality: Thrift and Christmastime in Shakespeare and in the Literature of Husbandry 39 Jessica ROSENBERG 3 “Here’s Strange Alteration!”: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Political Discord in Coriolanus 67 THOMAS P. ANDERSON Part II Economy and Ecology 4 Hospitality’s Risk, Grace’s Bargain: Uncertain Economies in The Winter’s Tale 89 JAMES KEARNEY 5 Hospitality in Anthony and Cleopatra 112 SEAN LawreNCE Part III Script 6 Ave Desdemona 133 DAVID HILLMAN vi Contents 7 As You Like It and the Theater of Hospitality 157 JAMES KUZNER 8 Hospitable Times with Shakespeare: A Reading of King Lear 174 THOMAS J. MORETTI Part IV Scripture 9 “Her Father Loved Me, Oft Invited Me”: Staging Shakespeare’s Hidden Hospitality in The Travels of the Three English Brothers 197 Sheiba KIAN KAUFMAN 10 Hospitality in Twelfth Night: Playing at (the Limits of) Home 222 JOAN PONG LINTON 11 Thinking Hospitably with Timon of Athens: Toward an Ethics of Stewardship 242 MICHAEL NOSCHKA Contributors 265 Index 269 Introduction David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton In act 1, scene 4 of Macbeth, Duncan, having declared Malcolm his suc- cessor, announces that he will be traveling to Inverness as Macbeth’s guest. Macbeth responds by electing himself the king’s “harbinger”: The rest is labour, which is not used for you; I’ll be myself the harbinger, and make joyful The hearing of my wife with your approach. So humbly take my leave. (1.4.45–47)1 Although by the end of the play, the word “harbinger” bears our modern sense of an omen or forerunner (5.6.10), its appearance here is more techni- cal: the harbinger was the court official who preceded the monarch on his or her progresses in order to ensure, among other things, that “the bedrooms had chairs, beds, carpets, and hangings”—tasks gathered under the rubric of “appareling,” the same term used when great halls and banqueting houses were set up as theaters using timber frames and handsome textiles to assem- ble stages and seating.2 Duncan has just spoken of “investing” Malcolm as heir (1.4.41), one of many references to formal attiring in the play. What is at stake in the harbinger’s charge is another kind of investiture, not of persons but of spaces, which will be decked with special fabrics whose affor- dances of enclosure and warmth also symbolize magnificence and support the tremulous sense of occasion required by the hosting of a king.3 Duncan will presumably meet his end in a properly outfitted state bed, a confec- tion of elaborate tapestries hung on a wood frame that erected a chamber within the chamber, a holy of holies for royal guests.4 Duncan is killed as a guest in his sleep, a violation of the simultaneously social and somatic forms of trust that the rituals, architecture, and accoutrements of hospitality are designed to cultivate. In a similar complex of hospitality rituals and theatrical actions, the stag- ing of the banquet scene (what kind of table? how is it brought on stage? how is it angled? what seating will furnish it?) often shapes a range of other dramaturgical choices in response to the affordances of the theatrical setting. On one hand, banqueting tables carried in by servant-stagehands and set on trestles aptly link the great halls of Renaissance England to the fast scene 2 David B. Goldstein and Julia Reinhard Lupton changes required of theatrical work; such tables, moreover, with their clear heads, sides, and lower reaches, also support the hierarchy of formal dining that is with us still. A round table or even simply an open circle of stools (as Trevor Nunn imagined it at The Other Place in 1976), on the other hand, activates a thrust stage or theater in the round and conscripts the audi- ence as guests at the party, occupying their own outer ring.5 However and wherever it is staged, the scene draws on hospitality’s play between hierar- chy and equality, both among hosts and guests and between chairs of state and mere stools, and it builds the hospitable scripts of invitation, greeting, toasting, and leave-taking into its dramatic action.6 The scene incorporates liturgical and Eucharistic resonances—hosting as Hosting—into its ritual texture while maintaining those references on the profane plane of exposure to the forms of creaturely life that hospitality tends to: our need for shelter and sleep and food and drink as well as recognition and acknowledgement, and the various ecologies of building types, durable goods, consumable offerings, and social scripts that communities have composed to shape the delivery of those benefits. Macbeth, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, is as fascinated by the failure of hospitality as by its invocation. Against a set of ideals about the obliga- tion to shelter, feed, and honor the guest within one’s literal and prover- bial walls—ideals that early modern England both held sacred and fiercely debated—Macbeth depicts hospitality in the form of its own undoing. It “repeatedly evokes the rites and pleasures of conventional hospitality,” writes James Heffernan, “even as it undermines them.”7 The play forms and dissolves around scenes and spaces of welcome: the castle that is also a trap, entered through a door whose gatekeeper—the porter—provides comic wel- come for the audience even as he tries to keep out devils and Jesuits.

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