Paper Session 1

Welcome to paper session one. We'll be hearing from six scholars this afternoon in a session moderated by Hank Dobin, Dean of Washington and Lee University. Each of these presenters has only 10 minutes (if they're not using actors) or 13 (if they are) before having a bear unleashed on them.

So, as before, I'm going to try to keep up as scholars present their works. Please bear with me, I'm not as fast a typer as I used to be. Bear. Get it? Eh? Eh? Nevermind...

Lois Potter: Why Ancient Pistol (Mis)quoted The Battle of Alcazar

Dr. Potter explores a scene from The Battle of Alcazar in which Pistol offers meat to Calipolis. Calipolis, offered the raw meat of a lion, protests that she is too queasy to eat of it, although she is hungry. The stage direction is here unclear: does she eat or not.

Dr. Potter refers to a scene in The Taming of A Shrew where Kate is offered meat on a dagger. This is apparently commonly assumed to be a parody of Tamburlaine, but Dr. Potter finds it more likely that it refers to The Battle of Alcazar.

This raises the question of potential actions in Shakespeare's The Taming of The Shrew where the stage direction reads "enter Petruchio with meat." Dr. Potter has her actors explore this stage direction with both raw meat on a dagger and prepared meat on a dish. The wildly differing implications for the actor are clear.

Dr. Potter suggests that a question that might arise from this is whether both options might have been played. It is possible that the joke might have been carried over from A Shrew into The Shrew when the reference was still fresh, but as Battle of Alcazar was forgotten, the intention was changed.

Leslie Thomson: Questions to be Asked in 1 Henry IV

Shakespeare's playgoers knew the answers to the questions posed in 1H4, but asking the questions will allow the audience to suspend their knowledge of the answers. "The repeated use of questions helps to both keep us interested and chart [Hal's] progress" as Hal progresses from a wayward prince to the great English king.

The contrast of the questions between 1H4 and 2H4 is notable because of the different effects that each achieves. In 1H4, the questions of Hal's character are not yet resolved. The focus on the questions is mostly on Hal. The rebels have answers, but King Henry questions the actions of his own son in contrast to those of Hotspur. Falstaff and Hal also engage in Q&A.

After 5.1, when Hal has demonstrated his intent to live up to his vow to be noble, Shakespeare presents Falstaff asking and answering his own questions about the nature of honor. By the time, the audience has already discerned Hal's true nature, and thus the rhetorical device will not be as necessary.

James Loehlin: Cymbeline: Three Scenes of Spectacular Theatricality

Cymbeline's use of overt theatricality is limited to three intensely spectacular moments. The emergence of Iacimo from the trunk, the resurrection of imogen, Posthumus' dream of his ancestors and the appearance of Jupiter. It is otherwise "economical" in its use of theatricality. Dr. Loehlin bases his presentation on the production of Cymbeline that he recently directed at Winedale.

Iachimo's appearence is not a surprise, and Imogen's vulnerability puts her in a dangerous position, but Iachimo's initial speech, wherein he declares he will leave her sleeping, allows the audience to be liberated from worrying for Imogen's safety. No matter what liberties Iachimo takes with her, the audience is assured that she is safe in the moment.

When Imogen awakes next to a headless body in Posthumus' clothing was also greeted with laughter in the Winedale production. The staging has an element of the absurd because the audience knows that the headless body is not real, and the dramatic irony of the audience's knowledge that Posthumus is safe gives the scene a greater sense of humor. Dr. Loehlin found that audiences who saw the scene in general lighting tended to respond with laughter more than audiences who were not. The openness of the staging invites the audience to partake in the complete joke.

The appearance of Jupiter on the second level of the Blackfriars stage also produces a markedly jocular response. Initially Winedale resisted the laughter of the scene, but went on to embrace it as part of the play. Many of the later comedies present a similar scenario: the audience is satisfied with their knowledge that things are not as bad as they seem. The dramatic irony of these scenes is enhanced by a miraculous spectacle that brings everything to its proper comic conclusions. Moments of recap of narrative serve a similar comic turn: the audience can take pleasure in being reminded of things they have forgot as the characters discover them.

Catherine Loomis: Must Give us Pause

Shakespeare makes use of pauses throughout his works, and he does so to achieve similar effects. A pause will allow the audience a moment to consider the impact of what they have seen and try to calculate what must follows. Pauses also provide a space for characters within the play to question themselves, and this allows an actor to exploit those moments of dramatic tension.

Despite the presence of other early modern stage directions that indicate specific types of pauses, Shakespeare rarely uses these. As we know, with thanks to Dr. Andrew Gurr, that Shakespeare's theatre was a collaborative one, this allows the actors greater participation in crafting the ending to the play. As Dr. Loomis' actors demonstrate, even when the resolution will not change, the presence of the pause calls this resolution into question, and gives it greater tension.

Characters facing life altering decisions would take time to think, even in the world of a stage.

Jeremy Lopez: Webster's Queasy Dramaturgy

Dr. Lopez begins with the assertion that "John Webster is good at making you queasy." (He gets no argument from me there). Webster puts his audiences in a position of being unable to acertain what his actors are doing, if they are in fact doing anything at all. I.e. were the wax figures in The Duchess of Malfi wax figures or actors?

Citing Westward, Ho! his characters feign illness regularly. Mistress Tenterhook, by her words, suggests that she is certainly love sick. The signs of bodily ailment are not reliable indicators of actual illness, and the actor playing this character (as well as others) has considerable leeway in determining how physically ill the characters may actually be. The physical symptoms they exhibit can easily be signs of a psychological malady that they feel more keenly.

R. Carter Hailey: Shakespeare "Here" and "Now": The Fierce Urgency of Performance

Dr. Hailey here concerns himself with the theatrical "now" of performance. Shakespeare's knowledge of the immediacy of the theatrical experience is revealed by his use of meta-theatricality. The mechanicals of Midsummer are genuinely terrified that their presentation of a lion will terrify the ladies in their audience, and while we can laugh at the unintended bombasticity of the notion, the theatrical illusion relies on this very sort of immediacy.

Dr. Hailey seems to note be using any actors in a presentation that could really benefit from them. He provides examples from Macbeth, Henry V, Othello, and others plays where actors are conscious of the immediacy of their circumstances, and invoke the literal "here and now" of the world of the play.

It seems to me that by using characters that insist on the immediacy of moments within the play by the use of the words "here" and "now," Shakespeare invokes the theatrical illusion with similar effect to the questioning mechanism that Dr. Thomson addressed earlier. Ultimately the line between the world of the stage and the world of the audience is blurred. Oddly enough, this is completely contrary to the humor Dr. Loehlin found in Cymbeline by use of dramatic irony.

It looks like the bear went unfed this session, as our scholars have all been within time. I'll be standing by with my camera for the next session to capture his first official appearance. In any case, I'll be back with another update after the next paper session. See you around 5!