Paper Session 11

Good morning, folks, and welcome back for the final day of the Blackfriars conference. It's a bright and crisp Sunday morning, and while a number of scholars have already departed us, we still have one more paper session, and a series of conversations about ASC's Globe theatre to go. Ralph Alan Cohen is introducing this sessions moderator, Terry Southerington, so it looks like our last paper session is about to get started.

Sarah Outterson: Acting the Ghostly Body in The Duchess of Malfi and The Second Maiden's Tragedy

At the same time that the corporeality of ghostly characters is in question, both within the context of stage and within the context of religion, ghosts, wax figures, and corpses present a particular kind of role of the audience's imagination in creating a play." In both plays, a body without spirit and a spirit disembodied are present, and the presence of the ghostly figures calls attention to the physical body of the actor playing it.

Outterson examines records of Jesuit Priests impersonating spirits to fright young women in converting to Catholocism, and pamphlets that expose their approaches in theatrical terms that parallel the appearance of ghosts on the early modern stage.

Stage directions present in the texts indicate the beauty of the maiden carrying on within her spirit, and the presence of the corpse and the ghost on stage simultaneously would seem to ask the audience to believe the character is divided into two bodies. The bodily presence of the actor most logically playing the spiritual body of the ghost. Similarly, the wax figures of the children in Duchess of Malfi seem to ask for the actors to play the roles of the figures, and thus bring their corporeal presence to non-living bodies.

And then the bear removed Outterson's paper.

Michael Boecherer: Power in Performance: The Renaissance Stage Witch as Theatrical Agent

The stage presence of witches on the Elizabethan stage is much weaker than in the Jacobean stage. In Elizabethan play, witches have less stage time, rarely perform magical effects, and their subservience to the devil is often emphasized. In the later Jacobean stage, witches are seen to cast spells, fly, and perform other supernatural aspects.

By casting the witch as a figure who had sold her soul to obtain her power, Elizabethans conceived her as being on the lowest levels of demonological hierarchy. Boecherer finds this odd, given that witches, with their power to call down curses and cast other spells, are effectively stripped of their power and made into simple pawns of a greater evil force. In 1H6, for example, Joan calls on spirits to assist her, and they simply ignore her calls. The conjured spirits are independent agents that are not beholden to the will of the conjurer.

Jacobean conceptions of witchcraft derive from continental conceptions that give witches the ability to fly, command spirits, and work together to greater effect. They first achieve their power in Jonson's masques, which took advantage of Inigo Jones' stage machinery, ceiling traps, and accompanied them with music and dance.

In Macbeth, the witches are a complex mix. They answer the call of their familiar demons, fly off stage through the fog and filthy air, and boast of their ability to call down curses. Still, their power clearly has limitations. When providing Macbeth with prophecies in act 4, the answer comes from their demonic masters and not from the witches themselves, and Banquo recognizes them as servants of a greater darkness. Thus, as the witches are weaker forces, Macbeth should be capable of resisting them. They are neither goddesses nor fates, they are simply an influence.

In Q&A an audience member brought up the point that, in the Jacobean era, there was a decreasing confidence in the authority's ability to detect witchcraft. Freed from constraints of verisimilitude offered by official testimonials of what defined a witch and what a witch was capable of, that might have led to an increase desire for theatricality in the presentation of witches.

Charles Salembier: The Unique Character of the Fool: Exploring Personality and Motive

Shakespeare is the only English Renaissance poet to employ the fool as a narrative device that has the ability to talk truth to power without fear of punishment. In Erasmus' In Praise of Folly, he employs the fool as a way to strip through vainglorious disguises and cure mankind's foolish behavior. Shakespeare, who cwould have been aware of Erasmus' text, employs his fools to a similar purpose.

Salembier credits Armin's Touchstone as the first of Shakespeare's true fools (Kemp being more of a clown). In As You Like It, the Touchstone cynically (and disgustingly) comments on his own follies in love as a way of mirroring the love of the higher status characters, and thus providing a foil for them. Rosalind's analysis of the follies of love serves all of the lovers in the play, including Touchstone and Audrey.

In All's Well, Shakespeare seems to be losing faith in the fools ability to curb mankind's folly. it is the story itself that underscores the foolishness of love and marriage, and the primary characters perform the corrective trickery necessary to bring about the comic resolution. Likewise in Timon of Athens, the fool's role is performed by a character other than the fool; the philosopher is identified as another source of mankind's folly, and from there, fools disappear from Shakepseare's stage.

Maryam Zomorodian: Staging the Matter of "worm-eaten books": Heywood, History, and Performance

During the Elizebethan and Stewart periods, recreations of the past led to a dramatic seeing of the past. England did not have a history of historical painting, but the historical play served this role. History lessons also appear within the context of Heywood's plays, where the historical record of an individual can be seen in their works left behind on earth. In 1592, Thomas Nash wrote in praise of historical drama such as this, suggesting that the private study of history offered a limited experience, but dramatic reconstruction of history in a public context allows the audience to share a communal sense of history. Embodied performance is distinct from the archive, and distributes history in a non-textual way through illiterate audiences.

Kathryn M. Moncrief: "Be stone no more": Performing/Reforming Femininity in The Winter's Tale

Moncrief begins by thanking her actors and offering that, as it's near the end of the conference and she's presenting on Winter's Tale, she'll be disappointed if she doesn't see the bear. Looking at 1.2 and 5.3, Moncrief seeks to show that 5.3 is a reworking of 1.2. Suggestions that women are to "perform subjection" is telling as it indicates that an outward sign of quiet and subservience is considered a virtue of early modern women, but that this should only be a performance. Hermiones unregulated speech, in conjunction with her heavily pregnant body, Leontes' behavior isn't surprising in the context of early modern fears of female speech and sexuality.

Her actors demonstrate Hermione's use of witty banter and rhetorical skill to succeed where her husband has failed. Leontes views his pregnant wife speaking with his friend, and views this in context of her own courtship. His belief that she's spoken with an unknown man is the evidence he needs to believe she is unchaste. Like in Othello, unrestrained speech replaces evidence of infidelity. Both Hermione and Desdemona are innocent, but fail to protect themselves, and thus demonstrate the dangers of misconstruing unregulated feminine speech.

There's a lot more to this paper than I'll be able to capture here, as Moncrief has so seemlessly integrated the performance of her actors with the presentation of her speech. Sorry, I just can't capture the visuals that well, and the text is grounded in those. This is definitely an exemplar of the combination of stagecraft and scholarship.

In 5.2, we see Paulina assuming the masculine role, and Leontes is decidedly silent in the presentation of Hermione as statuary. Feminine silence is refigured: Hermione has unfettered accesss to view the scene, and elects to remain silence to continue to observe Leontes. If she remains silent, it is a choice to reject Leontes, and if she chooses to speak, it is a choice to accept him. Either way, the feminine voice is given to Hermione as an instrument of her power.

Hermione, in a recapitulation of courtship, offers her hand to Leontes, and takes on the traditionally masculine role, and with a little prompting, the bear emerged to escort Moncrief offstage as she concluded her paper.

Jeanne McCarthy: "You shall ha' them set among ye": Performance at the Blackfriars

It is not merely the fact of the unsuitability of a boy actor for the role into which he is cast that makes the role interesting, it is the way in which the boy actor self consciously draws attention to this fact. A similar trope can be seen in the performance of clowns. McCarthy actors explores the audition scene from Jonson's Poetaster, where a player is called out by a captain, and the captain's boys demonstrates this self conscious theatricality.

The conceit of having boys perform parts in at least one recognizable adult company role can be seen as a desire to imitate the professional success of the adult companies. The audition scene plays with power dynamics similar to the playfulness of Love's Labours Lost or Cynthia's Revels. We cannot assume that mimicry in the era of the boy companies was unidirectional, and Jonson seems to have enjoyed writing in the mode of the boy companies for adults.

So that concludes our last paper session of the conference. Check back with us this afternoon for a report from the Globe sessions!