Action Bodies / Acting Bodies: Performing Corpo-Realities in Shakespeare's Late Romances Von der Philosophischen Fakultät der Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universität Hannover zur Erlangung des Grades einer Doktorin der Philosophie (Dr. phil.) genehmigte Dissertation von Eve-Marie Oesterlen geboren am 24. April 1974 in München 2017 Referentin: Prof. Dr. Liselotte Glage Korreferent: Prof. Dr. Rainer Emig Tag der Promotion: 24. November 2016 Zusammenfassung Ausgangspunkt dieser Arbeit ist die Annahme, dass das Spätwerk Shakespeares sich durchgängig und intensiv damit auseinandersetzt, „was es heißt zu wissen, dass andere, dass wir Körper haben“ (Stanley Cavell). Untersucht wird die Bedeutung, die ein solcher corporeal turn für die Rezeption von drei der von der Shakespeare-Forschung bisher eher vernachlässigten Romanzen hat: Pericles, The Winter’s Tale und Cymbeline. Das Augenmerk der Analyse richtet sich hierbei insbesondere auf die Art und Weise, in der sich Repräsentationen des handelnden Körpers im doppelten Sinne (action body/acting body) zur dichten textuellen und theatralischen Selbstreflexion der Stücke verhalten. Hierbei rekurriert die Analyse auf kritische Ansätze, die sich aus der neueren kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurswende in Bezug auf Körper und Performanz ergeben. Shakespeare, Körper, Performanz Abstract Proceeding from the premise that in his late plays Shakespeare continuously engages with the question of “what it is to know that others, that we, have bodies” (Stanley Cavell), this thesis examines the significance of such a ‘corporeal turn’ for the dramatic analysis of three of Shakespeare’s late romances: Pericles, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline. Following in the wake of critical approaches that have emerged from a new focus of interest in the body and performance, this thesis supplements a reading of the playtext with a reading of the text in performance to illustrate how representations of the performing body are bound up with and shaped by the plays’ intense textual and theatrical self-reflection. It argues that these plays’ penchant for bodily and textual resurrections goes hand in hand with a Jacobean predilection for romance, something that enabled playwrights like Shakespeare to challenge the limitations of prevailing classical orthodoxies defining the dramatic body in the dramatic space. Shakespeare, Body, Performance Acknowledgements Many eyes and ears have appraised this thesis, which has had a long (and not always straightforward) gestation period. My heartfelt thanks to all. I am grateful to the DAAD and the Leibniz University of Hannover for their generous support, and to the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and the British Library for providing space to think and write. I am grateful to Prof Dr Glage for her infinite wisdom and patience, and to Dr Elfi Bettinger and Leyla Ercan for their editorial insights. I thank Dr Katrin Bornemann and Dr Sabine Müller for their timely interventions, and Jenny Ogilvie, without whose unfailing support final delivery may never have happened. I dedicate this thesis to my uncle Samuel, who believed in happy endings. Table of Contents 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Mise en corps ....................................................................................................... 2 1.2 Form Matters: Shakespeare’s Late Romances .................................................... 7 2 “There may be matter in it” – Pericles, Prince of Tyre ............................................ 16 2.1 Grafting Flesh ..................................................................................................... 19 2.2 Incestuous Beginnings ....................................................................................... 21 2.3 Re-membering the Corpse .................................................................................. 29 2.4 Recovering the Ulcerous Sores ........................................................................... 34 2.5 Bodying forth Recognition ................................................................................. 39 2.6 Incarnate Delivery ............................................................................................... 46 2.7 Steering towards a Conclusion ........................................................................... 53 3 “Amazed with matter” – The Winter’s Tale ............................................................. 56 3.1 Conceiving the Issue ........................................................................................... 59 3.2 The Bawdy Planet ............................................................................................... 68 3.2.1 (Il)legal Issues ................................................................................................................... 72 3.2.2 The Miscarriage of Justice .............................................................................................. 77 3.2.3 Towards a Gracious Issue .............................................................................................. 85 3.3 Tragi-Comic Creations ....................................................................................... 89 3.4 The Return of the Body, or: Bohemian Rhapsody ............................................. 97 3.4.1 Shifting Liveries ............................................................................................................. 101 3.5 Begetting Wonder ............................................................................................. 107 3.5.1 Bodies of Knowledge .................................................................................................... 111 3.5.2 Simulatum Corpus, or: Why Shakespeare’s Bodies Go Ovid ................................. 113 3.5.3 The Shakespearean Re-Turn: Bringing Myth to Life ............................................... 121 4 “New matter still” – Cymbeline .............................................................................. 127 4.1 Absent Origins .................................................................................................. 131 4.2 Present Imaginings, or: How to (Un)Do Things with Words ......................... 135 4.2.1 Re-staging the Woman’s Part ....................................................................................... 147 4.3 The “rebellion of the cod-piece” ...................................................................... 149 4.4 Historical Trimmings ....................................................................................... 153 4.5 Dressing Down Nobility ................................................................................... 159 4.5.1 Valuing the Trace, or: In Pursuit of the Transitional Object .................................. 162 4.5.2 Trunks without Their Tops, or: How to Undo Things with Things ..................... 167 4.6 The Sparks of Nature, or: Blood Will Tell ........................................................ 176 4.6.1 The Matter of Britain, or: Why Shakespeare’s Bodies Go Historical .................... 181 4.7 “Simular proof,” or: Gathering the Props ......................................................... 184 5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 193 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 199 1 Introduction Language and materiality are fully embedded in each other, chiasmic in their interdependency, but never fully collapsed into one another, i.e., reduced to one another, and yet neither fully ever exceeds the other. Always already implicated in each other, always already exceeding one another, language and materiality are never fully identical nor fully different. (Butler, Bodies 69) How do human bodies make sense? This was the question that troubled me whenever confronted with dramatic texts, texts that unlike any other literary genre depend on the presence of physical bodies. The subject of this thesis evolved from a wish to investigate this ‘surplus’ matter, and from the irritation I felt when grappling with critical theory in an attempt to master such a wish. Following the well-trodden path of new historicist, cultural materialist and post-structuralist thinking enabled me to see, among other things, how cultural values and norms are inscribed in bodies and how the body of the unruly ‘Other,’ the Other that departs from the male norm, is continually (p)rescribed until it is eventually literally written out of the play. What these theories did not help me get closer to, however, was corporeality, the corpo- realness of the performing body that – not unlike the poor player in Macbeth – “struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more” (5.5.25-26).1 At the end of these literary analyses, therefore, it felt as if only disembodied corpses remained to litter my page, just as in the final mise en scène of a Shakespearean tragedy. And yet, this is by no means all. Where text is exhausted, as Carol Rutter has observed, meaning does not disappear: the mere physical presence of a corpse serves an excessive and thus troubling signifier that forestalls closure – the neat masculine ending envisioned by patriarchal ideology – by raising uneasy questions.2 Using a critical approach that thrived on text, and nothing but text, I had the distinct feeling that I was not doing